A Stairway to Heaven

A Stairway to Heaven Commentary by Naomi Billingsley Bible Passage Keith Haring (1958–90) painted this mural on the exterior of a stairwell at the Necker Children’s Hospital in Paris. Asking no payment for the work, Haring wanted it to be a gift to sick children at the hospital, providing something joyful for them to look at on what he thought an ugly building. Children were central to Haring’s artistic philosophy and practice. He embraced a child-like view of the world, and he loved working collaboratively with children on public art projects. For example, he made a 90-foot banner depicting Lady Liberty, with youth organisation CityKids in New York (1986), and a 520-foot mural with hundreds of school students in Chicago (1989). The iconic ‘radiant baby’ emerged as Haring’s tag as a street artist, and appeared throughout his work as a symbol of pure and positive human existence; a symbol of hope and potential. The mural was painted without preparatory sketches, embodying a child-like, spontaneous mode of making. It features radiant babies, playing with adults, amid free-form shapes in bold yellow, red, green, and blue. The effect is a circus- or party-like spirit. The building to which the staircase was attached was demolished in the 2010s. The preservation of the mural maintains Haring’s wish that it should entertain sick children then and in the future. Now, as a freestanding, totemic structure, the mural is a powerful symbol of the triumph of Haring’s child-like spirit. No longer leading to the floors of a hospital building, we might even view the monument as a kind of stairway to heaven; a point of connection, like Jacob’s Ladder, even in the midst of this world’s trials. This effect is accentuated at night, when the tower is illuminated, transforming it into a vertical beacon, pointing towards the heavens. Jesus declares that it is as a child that we must receive and enter the Kingdom of Heaven (Mark 10:15; Luke 18:17). Haring’s mural both embodies and depicts the spirit of the child, and might point us to be such as they are, as well as to a renewed vision of Heaven (see Matthew 19:15; Mark 10:14; Luke 18:16).