November 18, 2011–February 12, 2012
Morris A. and Meyer Schapiro Wing, 4th Floor

The first major museum exhibition to focus on themes of gender and sexuality in modern American portraiture, HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture brings together more than one hundred works in a wide range of media, including paintings, photographs, works on paper, film, and installation art. The exhibition charts the underdocumented role that sexual identity has played in the making of modern art, and highlights the contributions of gay and lesbian artists to American art. Beginning in the late nineteenth century with Thomas Eakins’ Realist paintings, HIDE/SEEK traces the often coded narrative of sexual desire in art produced throughout the early modern period and up to the present. The exhibition features pieces by canonical figures in American art—including George Bellows, Marsden Hartley, Alice Neel, and Berenice Abbott—along with works that openly assert gay and lesbian subjects in modern and contemporary art, by artists such as Jess Collins and Tee Corinne.

In addition to revealing connections between sexual identity and formal developments in modern art, HIDE/SEEK presents artists’ responses to the Stonewall Riots of 1969, the AIDS epidemic, and postmodern themes of identity, highlighted with major pieces by artists such as AA Bronson, Félix González-Torres, and Annie Leibovitz.  More than simply documenting a prominent subculture often relegated to the margins of American art, HIDE/SEEK offers a unique survey of more than a century of American portraiture and leads the way towards a more nuanced and inclusive understanding of modern art in America.
Some pieces in this exhibition are directed toward adult audiences. Parents and teachers are advised to preview the exhibition.

HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture was originally organized by the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, and has been reorganized by the Brooklyn Museum and the Tacoma Art Museum. The original presentation was co-curated by David C. Ward, National Portrait Gallery, and Jonathan D. Katz, director of the doctoral program in visual studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The Brooklyn Museum presentation is coordinated by Tricia Laughlin Bloom, Project Curator.

In the midst of the AIDS crisis, the poet Thom Gunn said he never thought there was a “‘gay community’ until the thing was vanishing.” In 1990, 18,447 Americans died of AIDS. The artist Keith Haring would be one of them, passing away on February 16, 1990, at the age of thirty-one. Haring had vaulted to public prominence as a graffiti artist whose comical and mysterious cartoons started appearing randomly in New York City’s subway system and led him to mainstream fame in the art world. The sketchy, skittering nature of his drawing is worked into this painting, but the structure of the unfinished work gives it a formal weight. The hanging strings of the unfinished painting suggest not just incompletion but unraveling.

Lunettes rondes sur le nez, tel Keith Haring, les visiteurs se promènent dans les rues de New-York des années 80, pour y découvrir les différentes facettes de l´œuvre de l´artiste : le mur peint de Houston Street, un des fameux dessins du métro, une exposition dans une galerie imaginaire, le Pop Shop, son alphabet secret, une voiture décorée durant les 24 heures du Mans, des sculptures surveillées par son célèbre personnage aux trois yeux...
Son "vocabulaire" et ses symboles, hiéroglyphes modernes et poétiques, servent de fil rouge à la visite. Les visiteurs terminent leur voyage en remontant le temps pour se retrouver dans l´Egypte Ancienne où ils pourront découvrir une véritable stèle et une statuette égyptienne placées en vis-à-vis d´un totem de Keith Haring.

Cette exposition est également accessible aux personnes en situation de handicaps (textes en braille, arc acoustique, manipulations pour malvoyants...). Exposition bilingue français/anglais.

Exposition réalisée grâce au prêt d´oeuvres de La Fondation Keith Haring, la Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont, la Galerie Enrico Navarra, la Galerie Laurent Strouk, le Musée des 24h du Mans, le Musée du Louvre, Vilac et Benjamin Sabatier.

Kenny Scharf (né en 1958)

Untitled, ca. 1983

Ancienne collection Keith Haring, New York

"The public has a right to art. Art is for everybody". 
Keith Haring

Keith Haring ranks among the most iconic, influential and popular artists in the world. Twenty years after his death, this is a rare and in-depth look at the prolific early years that established Haring’s language as an artist, his politics and social conscience, and his open homosexuality. This historic exhibition of rarely exhibited early work chronicles Haring´s arrival in New York City (from his native Pennsylvania) and his immersion in New York’s dynamic downtown culture. It explores the vibrant and experimental years when Haring first enrolled in the School of Visual Arts, started a diligent and vigorous studio practice, began making public and political art on the city streets and subway stations, and enjoyed a frenetic social life. Joining an art community outside the institutionalized art system, Haring quickly befriended fellow artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kenny Scharf, as well as many of the most innovative musicians, performance artists and graffiti writers of the period.

The exhibition delves into aspects of the artist’s life and production that have received insufficient attention to date: Haring as a thinker and facilitator, and his work as highly experimental and performative. It includes drawings and sketchbooks, videos, flyers, posters, photographs and subway drawings, as well as word collages, texts, and diaries. The exhibition offers an impression of Haring’s manifold maturation process, traces the development of his visual vocabulary and influences, and shows the artist as a philosopher and untiring initiator of artistic and political activities.

Keith Haring: 1978-1982 contains some mature content

This groundbreaking exhibition of Keith Haring’s early work is co-organized with the Kunsthalle Wien.