Radiant baby.

THE art world changes with such delirious speed these days that it no longer recognizes itself in what it produced only a decade ago. Consider the case of Keith Haring, that merry pictorial prankster of Manhattan in the Eighties who won fame and fortune by scribbling graffiti all over the Spring Street subway station. Now the subject of a major retrospective at the Whitney, Haring is associated with the East Village scene, whose exuberant populism once embraced everything from the Jetsons to the spray-painted walls of the inner city. And yet the merriment of that cultural movement, with its dazzling club life and its innocent high jinks, has become a faint memory. Ten years later, we are in a time of sober reckoning haunted by thoughts of mortality. Thus the pervasive mood of the present exhibition is one of sorrow, dominated as it is by the inescapable consciousness of the artist's death from AIDS seven years ago at age 31. Indeed, it is this element of suffering which alone grants to him one last breath of relevance in an art world that has otherwise rejected completely everything for which he stood.

Haring is unique among younger artists in having achieved the kind of popularity that is granted to few "high" artists, among them Dali, Warhol, and Lichtenstein. Though he is not exactly a household name, his broad-stroked, demotic style of drawing is immediately recognizable and has appeared in everything from UNICEF posters to a recent car commercial. With this single implement of broad and uninflected line, Haring recorded some of the most evocative archetypes of the post-modern mind: a radiant child, a barking dog, a pulsating pyramid.

The premise of Haring's art was explicitly leftist: his graffiti-style images implied populist sympathies as well as subversion of the power structures. And of course that nationally televised footage of the young rebel being removed from the subway in handcuffs did nothing to discourage sales among plutocrats suffering from the usual nostalgie de la boue. Yet even after one has recognized the slightly queasy hypocrisy in all of this, it must be said that Haring's images grow on you through a native force of line and composition of a sort that his more highly esteemed colleague, Jean-Michel Basquiat, never achieved. In both his Brazil from 1989 and his Untitled from 1985 -- the latter depicting, against a bright yellow ground, a Cerberean god feasting on innocent victims -- there is evidence of a real if limited skill in composing images and combining colors.

In this obedience, throughout his career, to a single style that he made his own, and a populist style at that, Haring recalls the equally popular Roy Lichtenstein. The problem with both artists is that they had neither the inclination nor the ability to advance or to go deeper. Haring has little to express beyond a vague pleasantness, a whiff of happiness. Any attempt at true feeling is immediately deflected and thwarted by a blithely eupeptic tone that was intrinsic to his art: his AIDS image seems as innocuous as his radiant babies and his barking dogs. There is little reason, therefore, to doubt that, even if this artist had lived an additional fifty years, he would have continued to make the same happy art in the service of a visual culture that, with each year, was growing more and more alienated from his populist vision.

The late Ivan Albright, whose centennial we now celebrate, is far less well known today than Haring, but for a few weeks in 1945 he was the most famous artist in America. That was the year the movie version of The Picture of Dorian Gray hit the silver screen. It was shot in black and white, except for the coup de the"tre in which the camera, leaping into Technicolor, revealed the portrait's harrowing transformation under the manifold sins of its sitter. MGM held a contest to find an artist who could do justice to this idea of moral corruption, and they came up with the man whom Providence itself had evidently appointed to execute so gruesome a commission.

Albright's Picture of Dorian Gray, now on display in a retrospective at the Metropolitan, is one of the strangest masterpieces you will ever see. Its full-length figure appears in a state of purulent and mottled putrefaction. The Devil as always is in the details -- in this case, the manic insistence with which Albright registers each green and purple pustule, each livid, tumorous patch of yellow scar and turquoise scab sprouting spontaneously from the rotted flesh. The image is inexhaustible. It keeps coming at you, revealing degrees and details of dangerous contagion which may escape even the most diligent inspection.

Many people wanted to buy Albright's works, but the cantankerous artist was independently wealthy and only rarely agreed to part with them. His Dorian Gray is of a piece with the rest of his oeuvre: numerous portraits of himself and his family are not much more flattering. In his gruesome view of human flesh, Albright recalls certain old masters. Yet he is an American original, whose dark and gothic sensibility, a mixture of Poe and Cotton Mather, is best exemplified in his famous image The Door. This eight-foot-high-by-three-foot-wide painting consists of a battered old door, shut for an eternity and adorned with an ashen, funereal wreath. From the left, at first unseen, a tiny, deadish, neatly manicured hand reaches for the doorknob. The contemporary critic was not far off who called this "one of the most unusual and distinguished pieces of painting ever produced in the United States."