Keith Haring's Journals

Alexis Kirschbaum, Editorial Director, on an iconoclastic twentieth century artist, and why he's a better fit for Penguin Classics than you might imagine. 

Keith Haring was one of America’s most influential artists in the wake of Pop, famous for bringing street art into the gallery, and gallery art into the streets and subways of New York. This month we are very pleased to add his Journals to our Modern Classics list. They are the mirror of an extraordinary life, recounting his early days in art school, his thoughts on the nature of art and creativity, the corrosiveness of fame, and the idea of a painting as a visual poem (complete with hieroglyphs and pictograms). In them he developed his own philosophy of art, and his commitment to populism can be found throughout his journal, expressed in his characteristic sloganeering: ‘The public has a right to art!’ ‘Art is for everybody!’

All this may seem a world away from Penguin Classics. But is it? Allen Lane was committed to the democratic availability of great literature and translations when he started Penguin Classics, believing that literature, in first-rate editions, should not be the preserve of a few but an affordable opportunity for many.

At Penguin we continue to devote ourselves to Allen Lane’s ideals. This means not only producing excellent editions at affordable prices, but also finding ways to present the classics to a new readership and to make links between contemporary tastes and the art of the past. Central to this is the design of the books, which has always been central to Penguin Classics. 

To this end, we have recently begun to commission major contemporary artists to create new covers for some of our classics, to refresh and modernize great literature. Among the first of these collaborations have been Damien Hirst and Origin of the Species, Cy Twombly and Virgil’s Georgics, Anselm Keifer and Letters to a Young Poet, Yayoi Kusama and Alice in Wonderland (forthcoming), and Harland Miller and Edgar Allan Poe.

Classics sometimes have an undeservedly stuffy reputation. But one of the things we want to remind people of with these collaborations is that Penguin Classics is a collection of history’s most culturally radical books. Contemporary art helps us modernize Penguin Classics visually, in a way that reminds people that every classic began as a revolutionary work of art. 

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Comments

[Kristin]

For anyone looking to buy their own Keith Haring piece, there's one up for auction on September 22, 2010 at Rockafeller Plaza in New York, but you can also bid online at:

http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/lot_details.aspx?from=searchresults&intObjectID=5351778&sid=bafd5229-acd3-4049-b917-f0a4e383b5ca

Lot Description:
Keith Haring (1958-1990)
Untitled
signed and dated 'K. Haring Oct. 30. 88' (on the reverse)
gouache, ink and printed paper collage
22 x 30¼ in. (55.8 x 76.8 cm.)
Executed in 1988.

[Little House On The Prairie DVD box set]

All the blessings we enjoy are the fruits of labor, toil, and self-denial, and study.