Mapplethorpe, Robert

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MAPPLETHORPE, Robert

MAPPLETHORPE, Robert (b. 4 November 1946; d. 9 March 1989), artist, photographer.

The work and name of Robert Mapplethorpe have become synonymous with issues of censorship and homosexuality. In June 1989, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., cancelled a Mapplethorpe retrospective entitled The Perfect Moment, which was scheduled to open a few weeks later. The cancellation, which occurred amid conservative attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), which had partially funded The Perfect Moment, provoked a national controversy over creative freedom and homoerotic art. That controversy led, in turn, to content restrictions on federally funded art and the attempted dismantling of the NEA.

Mapplethorpe had died of AIDS-related causes in March 1989, three months prior to the Corcoran cancellation. By the time of his death, he had emerged as one of the most successful U.S. art photographers of the post–World War II era. His elegant prints commanded critical attention (if not always praise) and high prices within the burgeoning market for art photography in the late 1970s and 1980s. In order to augment the market value of his work, Mapplethorpe often presented his photographs as luxury objects, whether by printing them on linen, surrounding them with fabrics such as silk, velvet, or leather, or enclosing them in unique frames of his own design.

Throughout his career, Mapplethorpe organized his photography into three major themes: still lifes, portraits, and homosexuality—or, as one magazine put it, "flowers, faces, and fetishes" (Fritscher, p. 15). Each of these themes was filtered through a signature style that emphasized formal symmetry, intricate tonal gradations, and an utter clarity of texture and visual detail. Mapplethorpe delighted in presenting wildly different subjects as equally stylized forms of photographic delectation. "I don't think there's that much difference," he once said, "between a photograph of [a] fist up someone's ass and a photograph of carnations in a bowl" (Hodges). Mapplethorpe's pictures of sadomasochism were no less aesthetic than his still lifes, and his pictures of flowers could be as erotically suggestive as his portraits of leathermen.

Although Mapplethorpe's reputation as an artist rests almost entirely on his photographic output, he studied painting and sculpture (not photography) at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, from 1963 to 1969. As a student, Mapplethorpe favored psychedelic paintings and drawings based loosely on French surrealism and the engravings of William Blake. In 1967, Mapplethorpe met Patti Smith, an aspiring poet and singer, and the two moved in together in an apartment near Pratt. Smith became one of Mapplethorpe's best friends and frequent models. In 1969, Mapplethorpe dropped out of Pratt and moved, with Smith, into the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan.

At this time, Mapplethorpe was creating collages and mixed media objects, many of which incorporated male nude photographs appropriated from pornographic magazines. These works, which bore titles such as Ah Men, Cowboy, and Untitled (Blow Job), sexualized the male body while simultaneously suggesting, through the use of obscuring bars and spray paint, the censorship to which such homoerotic images had historically been subjected. For all their visual wit, Mapplethorpe's collages were not considered commercially viable by the galleries he approached at the time. Perhaps because of this, Mapplethorpe moved away from collage and mixed media work and increasingly focused on photography.

In 1972, Mapplethorpe met Sam Wagstaff, a wealthy art collector and curator who became his mentor and, briefly, his lover. With Wagstaff's help, Mapplethorpe landed his first one-man show at the Light Gallery in New York in 1973. The exhibition featured Polaroid photographs, several of which were self-portraits. Following the show, Mapplethorpe turned to large-format press camera and, ultimately, to a Hasselblad.

In 1975, Smith signed a contract with Arista records and Mapplethorpe shot the cover for her first LP, Horses. Mapplethorpe's stark portrait of the singer in a man's shirt and suspenders, standing against a blank white wall, marked one of the aesthetic highpoints of his early career. Between 1977 and 1980, he produced a series of intense and impressive photographs of gay sadomasochism, of its practitioners and paraphernalia, while continuing to create pictures of flowers and celebrities. During this time, Mapplethorpe was taken on by the Robert Miller Gallery in New York and developed an international reputation, with one-man shows in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Paris, Amsterdam, and Brussels.

Around 1980, Mapplethorpe began to photograph black men, some of whom he met at gay bars and pursued for both sexual and photographic purposes. Unlike the men in the sadomasochistic pictures, Mapplethorpe's black male nudes are always muscular, youthful, and well endowed. The nudes have been cut to the very pattern of Mapplethorpe's desire for them. In 1986, Mapplethorpe published The Black Book, a controversial collection of black male nudes, which continues to stand as one of his signature projects. Later that same year, Mapplethorpe was diagnosed with AIDS. In 1988, his health on the decline, he established the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, a charitable organization that funds both AIDS research and photography exhibitions and research.