Against All Odds: Keith Haring in the Rubell Family Collection

Against All Odds is the Rubell Family Collection’s 2009 book on its Keith Haring holdings, edited by Mark Coetzee, the collection’s director.

The 288-page hardcover is illustrated throughout and carries texts by Steven Nash, Robert Hobbs and Coetzee. D.A.P. says it reproduces the whole of the collection’s Haring holdings, many pieces published here for the first time, alongside work by artists it calls Haring’s mentors and friends, among them Andy Warhol, Francesco Clemente, Jean-Michel Basquiat, George Condo and Tseng Kwong Chi. Coetzee also interviews Don and Mera Rubell about Haring. D.A.P. dates their first encounter to 1981, when the Rubells went to a graffiti-art show at the Mudd Club that Haring had co-curated.

An exhibition of the same title, curated by Coetzee, ran at the Palm Springs Art Museum from 8 November 2008 to 18 January 2009. Its page lists 70 paintings, drawings and one sculpture by Haring, from works made for his first gallery show in 1982 to others made near his death in 1990 at the age of 31, plus 33 works by other artists. The page frames Haring as a draftsman concerned with line and mark-making, and sets that against a view of him as a maker of superficial icons.