Keith Haring's Work at the Brooklyn Museum An installation view of Keith Haring's "Matrix" at the Brooklyn Museum. KEITH HARING'S ebullient, graffiti-based work epitomized an entire strain of 1980s art. His inspiration came from the street and from comic books, not from museums, and it burst onto the scene alongside that of similarly minded peers like Kenny Scharf and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Though simply drawn, Haring's figures, particularly the "radiant baby," were instantly recognizable. By the time of his death at the age of 31 in 1990 his work had become famous, in part through its wide dissemination on T-shirts, buttons and other merchandise, much of it sold through his retail outlet, the Pop Shop, which lasted from 1986 to 2005 (and still exists online). But the exhibition "Keith Haring: 1978-1982," at the Brooklyn Museum through July 8, attempts to demonstrate the complexity and seriousness of Haring's vision, making a case that it involves more than just cute babies. "There's so much depth in this work," said Raphaela Platow, director of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati and the organizer of the show (with the Kunsthalle Wien). But it requires you to really look. He's using a code. The exhibition features several of Haring's journals, which are filled with diagrams and strict theories of geometric composition, as well as quotations from Roland Barthes and Wassily Kandinsky. For an entry in the early 1970s Haring even created seven separate codes for the English alphabet, including a hippie version, in which each letter corresponds to a symbol like a heart or the peace icon. He also added instructions on how to trip up potential code crackers. The 30-foot-long ink-on-paper "Matrix" (top photo), which is part of the Brooklyn exhibition, makes the density in Haring's work clear, even when only one small section (detail, here) of the monumental piece is examined. Haring created it in 1983, when he was just 25. An earlier version of this article misstated the age of Keith Haring at the time of his death in 1990. He was 31, not 32.