Leave the kids at home when visiting the Haring exhibition

If you go to see the Keith Haring show, don’t take the kids. I wasn’t familiar with Haring’s work, and I got quite a shock when I visited “Keith Haring: A Political Line” at the de Young. These paintings are, for the most part, grotesque and obscene.

In the the Fine Arts Magazine featuring Haring’s “Untitled (Self-Portrait)” on the cover, I read the exhibition “examines political themes.” Human cruelty and perversity are amply portrayed, but how is that political?

Haring’s large paintings of electrified dogs, masturbating stick figures and crude scenes of mayhem, torture and bestiality reveal only his own tormented mind. I notice the de Young didn’t choose to put any of these images in the program or in the online preview of the show. Gee, I wonder why?

But there was something that touched me: Those lines of cookiecutter human figures had an amazing vitality. Abstract them from the gruesome and bizarre scenes they are part of, and they are joyous, playful, exuberant, alive and, for all their apparent childish simplicity, strikingly original.

There is one piece in “The Political Line” that, if I saw nothing else, would lead me to call him a genius: the painted steel sculpture from 1985. It is stunning. Otherwise, there is much that is disturbing among the other pieces and not much respite from this grim vision. The subway drawings must have been welcome visual relief for commuters, but out of context they’re simply not very interesting.

I felt cheated by “Keith Haring: The Political Line” and wished we could have had instead “Keith Haring: The Human Line.”

David Romano, San Francisco