About the artwork
This edition is a reproduction of "American Music Festival (New York City Ballet)", created by Keith Haring in 1988 for the eponymous festival organized by the New York City Ballet. For this event, Haring created a series of huge painted sets and costumes for the dancers, using his distinctive graphic vocabulary. The work is emblematic of his style: stylized human figures with thick black lines, dynamic bodies in motion, filled with vibrant, repetitive motifs. Against a bright white or sometimes colored background, the silhouettes dance, twirl and embrace, evoking both the vitality of music and the collective energy of ballet. By transposing his street language into the world of classical ballet, Haring breaks down the barriers between popular and learned art.
Expert opinion
This work illustrates Keith Haring's ideology: that of art that is alive, accessible and popular, yet conveys meaning and collective emotion.
About the artist
Keith Haring (1958-1990) was one of the leading figures of New York urban art in the 1980s. After studying at the School of Visual Arts in New York, he made a name for himself by spontaneously drawing with white chalk on black subway billboards. His playful, immediate and engaging style soon met with great success. His work is deeply influenced by graffiti, comics and street culture, but also by strong political themes: the fight against racism, the prevention of AIDS (from which he died in 1990), and the denunciation of social injustice.
Haring firmly believed in the accessibility of art: he opened his Pop Shop in 1986 to make his works affordable, while continuing to produce monumental public works around the world. His works have been exhibited many times, notably in New York in 1982 and in 2013 at the Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris.
Additional info
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