Keith Haring had the singular ability to depict the complexity of the present with both its sublime and horrifying aspects as well as its marvelous and monstrous forms. He did so by means of lightness and irony, pleasure and gaiety, interwoven with an iconographic hardness and an acuteness rooted in the origin of his myth as a both angelic and demonic artist. This myth was fully experienced in Haring's time, which was made up of the computer and the subway, spaceships and television, racial uprisings and ethnic repressions, consumerism and AIDS. Haring, offering a visual and religious, a political and social interpretation, was quite aware that the fundamental meaning of human existence, both personal and collective, is not death, but rebirth. This book tries to grasp the rites of initiation and transmutation with which Haring sought to guarantee rebirth for himself - that is, access to a metahistorical condition: art.