“I had always had this interest in finding interesting… found objects. New York turned into this incredible source for all this kind of stuff.”
Keith Haring was a master at transforming found objects into jubilant works of art. During the early 1980s while making his way in New York City, Haring was working mostly with found objects as he galvanized his singular style, and it was only later that he began working on canvas in a more ‘formal’ way. In its impressive scale, iconic subject, and sheer graphic force, this rare Untitled (White Happy Face) from 1982 exemplifies the enduring power of Keith Haring’s celebrated artistic vernacular. Spray-painted on the hood of a metal postal van in determined black lines, Untitled (White Happy Face) recalls the frenetic and imaginative nature of Haring’s early graffiti-based practice. Executed at the pinnacle of Haring’s prolific period of drawing and tagging billboards in the New York subway system, the present work references the act of graffiti through material application and performative action. With this work, Haring manifests a recognizable symbol of happiness on an unconventional, utilitarian surface. Rendered with deft gestural dynamism, the caricatured face is immune from the inequity of modern life, instead exuding an overwhelming sense of joy and optimism.
As described by Carlo McCormick:
"Like a mutant cousin of pop culture’s ubiquitous smile sign, Haring’s streamlined language contours the physiognomy of ebullient joy with bulging eyes, an impossibly toothsome grin, a slapstick eruption of silent laughter and a semicircular patterning of smile lines, chin and eyebrows that simultaneously articulate and embellish this hysterically whacky face. Working in a city then largely characterized by struggle, crime, decay and despair, the beaming smiles that Keith Haring brought to the urban landscape indeed conveyed a kind of exuberance and glee with every unsuspecting encounter then as they still convey an eternal exultation in their carefree celebration of sheer delight."
- 1990
- 1991
- 2013
- 2018
- 2022 - 2023
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1990Keith Haring: Future Primeval at Queens Museum, New York, September - November 1990 -
1991Keith Haring: Future Primeval at Queens Museum, New York, Illinois State Unviersity, University Galleries, January - February 1991 -
2013Keith Haring, The Political Line at Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, April - August 2013 -
2018Inaugural Exhibition at Fondation Carmignac, Paris, June - November 2018 -
2022 - 2023Somewhere Downtown at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, October 2022 - January 2023
Amongst Haring’s most iconic motifs, the present work is one of only ten single smiley faces in Haring’s practice, one of which is held in the prestigious collects ion of The Brant Foundation, New York. Contrasting the simplicity and infectious ease of his image, his van hood medium lends the work an immediate conceptual gravitas, recalling both the brazen energy of the Duchampian readymade and formal rigor of the Minimalists. The subject of a major upcoming, career-spanning exhibition at The Broad Museum beginning in May 2023, Haring is celebrated for his extraordinary ability to blur the line between high and low art; nowhere is this ability more evident than Untitled (White Happy Face), where medium, gesture, and image meet in a singular test.mes nt to the immediate and enduring power of Haring’s artistic vernacular. Underscoring the significance of the present work, Untitled (White Happy Face) bears a particularly robust exhibition history, and emerges today from a celebrated private collects ion where it has resided for over four decades.
Keith Haring's Smiling Face Paintings on Metal
“I don’t think art is propaganda; it should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further. It celebrates humanity instead of manipulating it.”
An ode to New York at its very essence, Untitled (White Happy Face) powerfully embodies the visceral creative energy and sense of possibility that existed within the New York cultural scene for a brief but heady period during the 1980s, which saw the birth of such trends as the rise of hip-hop, diverse club scenes, and graffiti. When Haring arrived in Manhattan in 1978, he surrounded himself with an active scene of young musicians and artists who fostered his ambitions and deeply inspired his work. Perhaps more importantly, he discovered art moving out of galleries and into public life, where graffiti thrived; following suit, Haring immersed himself in graffiti culture and inserted his newfound experiences, emotions, and beliefs into the rhythmic dialogue of his compositions. “I don’t think art is propaganda; it should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further,” Haring said in 1985. “It celebrates humanity instead of manipulating it.” (Keith Haring in conversation with Sylvie Couderc in “The Ten Commandments, An Interview,” The Keith Haring Foundation, 1985, (online)) In bold, self-assured strokes of spray paint across his broad metal expanse, Haring's confident eschews a pre-meditated schematic plan for spontaneous genius. Atmospheric mists of black surround the figure’s pupils and border, revealing Haring’s process of creation and the immediacy with which the work was born.
Evidenced in Untitled (White Happy Face), the 1980s saw Haring pioneer a return to emphatic figuration following decades of prevailing abstract and minimalist tendencies, establishing himself, alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat, as a ‘high priest’ of contemporary figurative representation. Like the work of his compatriots Basquiat and Andy Warhol, Haring’s Untitled (White Happy Face) fulfills a deep-rooted personal desire to serve as a narrator of the modern age. With Basquiat, Haring shared the ambitious, gritty origins of a street artist trained in the language of graffiti and tagging. With Warhol, he shared an interest in addressing socio-political ideals through reproduction and mass proliferation. Exclusive to Haring, however, was his fearless interruption of the status quo with joyous emoticons and stylized, cartoon-like depictions, breaking boundaries in the unyielding establishment of the art world. Similar to Marcel Duchamp, Haring elevated the found object into the realm of high art. With genius, gestural marks, the present work elevates the metal surface and thus the graffiti-like design itself. Sourced from his chalk subway drawings, Haring’s Untitled (White Happy Face) radically initiates and revamps the potential for artmaking with a departure from traditional modes of representation. Haring transforms the object itself into captivating iconography, elevating the graffiti culture he is representing to the pinnacle of art historical intervention and advancement.
The metal surface is grandly reconstituted by Haring in the present work: his skillful application of paint both emblemizes and equalizes the surface for mass consumption, gripping the viewer in a participatory experience. The once banal is enlivened to monumental status with Haring’s exceptional transformation of awe-inspiring proportion. Above all, Haring sought to dissolve the barriers between art and life and spread universal joy. As described by Haring: “My drawings do not try to imitate life, they try to create life, to invent life.” (Keith Haring quoted in Germano Celant, Ed., Keith Haring, Prestel, Munich, 1992, p. 116) Untitled (White Happy Face) is a test.mes nt to the infectious joy, gestural mastery, and enduring, universal appeal which characterize the very best of Keith Haring’s celebrated oeuvre.
