Blood lines

One of Barcelona’s great public art treasures is an intensely red linear mural on a concrete wall near the entrance of the MACBA in the Raval. The long horizontal piece depicts a horror story of drugs, illness and death being attacked by various Haring-esque creatures, humanoid forms and a condom. Good ultimately triumphs over Evil, and its message is upbeat: Todos juntos podemos parar el sida (Together we can stop AIDS). Sadly, AIDS stopped Keith Haring, one scant year after his visit to Barcelona. But his legacy lives on in this work. Just one thing: Is this really a Keith Haring mural? The answer is both yes and no. As they say in Spanish, ‘es complicado’.

This lasting monument to one of the great American artists of the Eighties came about spontaneously and quickly one winter week in 1989. Haring, a young superstar in the US, who first attracted attention by painting in New York’s subway stations, had gone to Madrid for the ARCO art fair and he wanted to see Barcelona before leaving Spain for Morocco. One Thursday night in February he found himself at an art reception at the Joan Prats Gallery on Rambla de Catalunya, which was showing the work of local artist Frederic Amat. There he met an old friend from New York, Montse Guillen—the art-and-food maven who, together with Catalan multi-disciplinary artist Antoni Miralda, created the famous TriBeCa eatery-cum-gallery, El Internacional Restaurant, which introduced the concept of the tapa to the US. 

“Keith, do you like Barcelona?” Guillen remembers the conversation starting. “Would you like to do something here?” His answer was that he didn’t want to do interviews; he didn’t want to talk. “Why don’t you do a mural?” Guillen asked him.  It was Thursday night, and he had scheduled only a few days in the city. “He’ll do a mural!” Guillen told her friend Angels Yagüe, a Spanish TV reporter, who was with her at the Amat reception.

The next day, Guillen and her friends hustled to make sure they could find a wall for Haring to paint. They enlisted the aid of influential local politician Ferran Mascarell, whom Guillen still credits for making the mural event possible. Haring chose a slanted wall in Plaça de Salvador Seguí, now the home of the Filmoteca de Catalunya. He was warned that this was one of the most dangerous areas of town, littered with needles, but he was attracted to it perhaps for that very reason, as he wanted to create a message about the dangers of drugs and AIDS. The wall was approved—a long, low buttress that leaned against a brick building—and a police presence was arranged.

"His legacy lives on through the powerful simplicity of his imagery...a universally recognised visual language"

Guillen, now an active septuagenarian who commutes between Miami and Barcelona, reminisced with me recently in a Poblenou studio that she and Miralda have filled with an archive of Miralda’s work spanning several decades. She seemed pleased to have the opportunity to revisit the moment in 1989, when she was instrumental in convincing Haring to leave a lasting legacy in Barcelona. “He liked breakfast. He liked sandwiches. He was very quiet. He didn’t talk much. He always had music playing when he worked.” He also worked quickly; her recollection is that the 34-metre-long mural was completed before lunchtime that Saturday (Haring’s journal has him arriving at 12pm sharp and working for five hours). In his diaries he commented on the angle of the wall that forced his body to do a kind of dance with the mural as he painted because he had to partially hover over it. When he was finished, the red testimonial to safe-sex-and-no-drugs seemed like a permanent fixture in the Raval. A lunch was arranged by Sidria Segura, who had been a bartender at El Internacional in New York, and Haring gave her his brushes as a keepsake of the event.

More adventures awaited Haring that Saturday and, by the end of the day, he had completed a second, smaller mural, behind the DJ booth at a disco on Carrer d’Atenes called Studio Ars, accompanied by Segura, Guillen, Amat and others. The mural is still visible behind the bar of the establishment, which is now a pool hall also called ARS. A few days later, after visiting the Sagrada Família, the Museu Picasso and the Fundació Joan Miró, he was gone.  

The Raval mural turned out not to be permanent. During the few years of its existence at its original location, it was severely tagged, scratched and disfigured. When the city decided to renovate Plaça de Salvador Seguí in 1992 as part of the ‘Special Plan for Interior Reform’ (Pla Especial de Reforma Interior, or PERI) in the Raval, the mural was scheduled for demolition. The city council stepped in and asked the director and curator of the fledgling MACBA, Daniel Giralt Miracle and Antónia Maria Perelló, to evaluate its condition and present a proposal to somehow save it. When it became clear that the original could not be preserved, paint samples were taken from the wall by a conservation team, and a full-scale tracing of the mural was made for eventual transfer to another wall. The plan was approved by the heirs of the artist, who had died in February 1990, aged 31.

Twice in the first decade after the mural’s disappearance (1996, and again in 1998), the tracing was used as a guide for transfer of Haring’s linear design to a wall near the MACBA entrance. If the spontaneous brushwork for which Haring was well-known is not in evidence, his design definitely is. The work is a meticulous process in the hands of the conservation and installation staff of the MACBA, who have made the lost work miraculously reappear in Haring’s vivid red on a gray concrete wall by pouncing paint through holes in the plastic and then connecting the dots. And although subsequent versions of the transparent tracing have been created, the one from 1992 is used as a master copy, according to conservator Silvia Noguer, so as to not lose any nuance.

In February 2014, on the 25th anniversary of the original event, MACBA, in agreement with the Keith Haring Foundation, re-created it for a third time. This one, says Noguer, is intended to be permanent. ¡Que viva Keith Haring!

A memoir by Frederic Amat

Frederic Amat reminisces about Keith Haring and his days in New York and Barcelona. Amat is a local visual artist, painter, filmmaker and writer.

In early Eighties New York, subway passengers were confronted with a series of drawings on black paper glued up around the stations, waiting to be replaced by the next paid campaign. There was no signature on the drawings, and I was fascinated by their radicality, far from the virtuosity of graffiti spray or testimonial tags.

At the time, I was working at the Dieu Donné Papermill in Soho, and was able to unstick one of these black panels, which I still have in my studio. After some time, we found out that the author was a student of the School of Visual Arts named Keith Haring. Throughout the decade, his work spread across the city like wildfire, and then across the world. 

The Lower East Side was the epicentre in those days. I remember seeing an exhibition of Haring’s drawings in the Mudd Club and at Tony Shafarzi’s Gallery on Mercer Street. It was there that I finally met Haring; we had a brief conversation and he signed a catalogue for me. 

I couldn’t have imagined that seven years later I would meet Haring again in Barcelona at the opening of an exhibition of mine. In just 10 years, Haring had shot to global fame, his constellation of images leaving a permanent mark on the history of 20th-century art. I have always felt in his work the dance of a singular calligraphy; even when it is repeated infinitely by merchandising, it does not diminish its subversive artistic identity. I am sure that the exhibition at Joan Prats must have been pretty boring for him. We talked about Miró, and I insisted that he go see the romantic murals exalting its frontality. 

Montse Guillen was among the friends at the opening that evening. Right there, Haring’s Barcelona mural was conceived and the best location offered, el barrio chino. I was very sad when it was removed from its original location, although today there is a nice copy near the MACBA. 

That same weekend, Keith, Gilbert Vázquez (Keith’s travelling companion), Montse and I, went to the ‘Ars’ disco. The DJ offered his decks to Gilbert while Keith painted a red figure on the wall. I was fascinated to see him dancing and painting freely, guided by a profound intuition. While I observed the scene, Montse took some Polaroids. After a while, Keith, looking at the pictures of himself painting, with Gilbert DJing and myself in the foreground, took his black marker and drew a big phallus coming out of my raincoat! I still have the Polaroid today, and a wonderful memory of a true artist partying away into the night, having left us a trace of great light on a wall of Barcelona.

Biography of Keith Haring

Keith Haring was born on May 4th, 1958, in Reading, Pennsylvania. He grew up in nearby Kutztown, and developed a love for drawing, taking inspiration from elements of contemporary pop culture, such as Walt Disney and Dr. Seuss. After graduating from high school in 1976, Haring did a brief stint studying at a commercial arts school in Pittsburgh before moving to New York City and enrolling in the School of Visual Arts (SVA). 

It was here that he really developed his identity as an artist, easily integrating into the thriving alternative art community of musicians, and performance and graffiti artists. In this environment he refined his signature style, defined by the primacy of the line, and in 1980 began using unused advertising panels on the metro to leave a public trail of his distinctive drawings. 

International recognition followed, with the first half of the Eighties seeing Haring complete a number of public projects, from an animation for the Spectacolor billboard in Times Square to designing Swatch watches and creating murals worldwide. Throughout his career, he was devoted to social projects, including his most famous mural Crack is Wack, as well as holding drawing workshops for children across the world and illustrating many literacy programmes. 

In 1988, Haring was diagnosed with AIDS and died in 1990, aged 31. His legacy lives on today through the powerful simplicity of his imagery, which has become a universally recognised visual language.

More Haring murals

• Collingwood mural (1984) at a former technical school in Melbourne, Australia. 
• Crack is Wack (1986) is an iconic anti-drug mural visible to the public near a major thoroughfare in New York City. This one has been repainted.
• Tower (1987) at the Hopital Necker des Enfants Malades in the 15th arrondissement of Paris.
• Untitled (1987), in the cafeteria of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, Belgium.
• Tuttomondo (1989) is on the outside wall of the church of Sant’Antonio Abate in Pisa.
• Monte Carlo Mural (1989) is located inside the Princess Grace Maternity Hospital, and was executed at the request of Princess Caroline of Monaco.

A full list of murals, their current status and a map can be found on the Keith Haring Foundation website.