<Archive Obituaries> Robert Mapplethorpe (March 9th 1989)
Bill Schenley
FROM: The New York Times (March 10th 1989) ~
By Andy Grundberg
Robert Mapplethorpe, a photographer whose widely exhibited
pictures combined classical beauty with sometimes shocking
subject matter, died of acquired immune deficiency syndrome
yesterday at New England Deaconess Hospital in Boston. He
was 42 years old and lived in Manhattan.
Mr. Mapplethorpe was first diagnosed as having AIDS two and
a half years ago, according to Howard Read of the Robert
Miller Gallery in New York, which represents his work. Since
then, the artist had become for many a symbol of courage and
resistance to the disease; his willingness to publicize his
illness helped focus attention on AIDS throughout the art
world and nationwide.
His 1988 self-portraits, which show his once-handsome face
grim and emaciated, have appeared in many magazines in
recent months. They are included in the artist's current
retrospective exhibition, which was organized by the
Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and is now on
view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Last
summer, the Whitney Museum of American Art presented an
independent survey of work throughout the artist's career.
An Instrument of Invention
Mr. Mapplethorpe first gained widespread notice in the late
1970's for his elegantly composed, beautifully printed
black-and-white photographs of the male figure, many of
which were explicitly homoerotic. But he photographed the
female nude with equal stylishness. Throughout his career he
made portraits and still lifes of an almost sublime
simplicity and intensity.
His photographs show a remarkable ability to give even the
most common photographic subjects the status of icons. He
was interested in the camera less as a documentary tool than
as an instrument of invention and role playing. In two
companion self-portraits taken in 1980, for example, he
appeared once as a leather-jacketed, macho tough and again
as a sultry, heavily made-up femme fatale.
Born in New York on Nov. 4, 1946, Mr. Mapplethorpe studied
at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn from 1963 to 1970. He began
his career as an independent film maker and as an artist who
used photographs within sculptural collages and
constructions.
Influenced by Sculpture
Even after he became known as a photographer, sculpture
remained a significant influence. In the spring of 1988, his
show at the Robert Miller Gallery in New York featured works
that combined photographic images printed on linen, panels
of exotic fabrics and wood frames of his own design. Besides
printing on linen, he also produced editions of platinum
prints and flocked images.
In style, Mr. Mapplethorpe's photographs most closely
resemble those of George Hoyningen-Huene and George Platt
Lynes, two fashion photographers of the 1920's and 30's
remembered for their mastery of light, classical
compositions and indebtedness to Surrealism. Like them, Mr.
Mapplethorpe was much in demand as a commercial
photographer. No matter how paltry or outrageous the subject
before the camera, he rendered it with the same cool, almost
clinically dispassionate gaze.
Designed a Coffee Table
Besides being influential as a photographer, Mr.
Mapplethorpe helped inspire Sam Wagstaff, the artist's
companion in the 1970's and a well-known art curator and
collector, to begin collecting photography on an enormous
scale. Mr. Wagstaff, who died of AIDS in January 1987,
eventually assembled a collection of several thousand
images, which he sold to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu,
Calif., in 1984.
Mr. Mapplethorpe collected photographs of his own as well as
furniture, fabric and art objects. An esthete of
wide-ranging tastes, he also designed furniture; one of his
designs for a coffee table was produced in a limited
edition. The coffee table was a centerpiece of Mr.
Mapplethorpe's exquisitely decorated apartment in Manhattan.
Last year Mr. Mapplethorpe established the Robert
Mapplethorpe Foundation, which is to focus on funding both
medical research, with an emphasis on AIDS, and the visual
arts, with an emphasis on photography.
Mr. Mapplethorpe's photographs are in the collections of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and
other major museums in the United States, Europe and Japan.
Over the last 10 years he had solo exhibitions in New York
at the Robert Samuels Gallery, the Holly Solomon Gallery and
the Robert Miller Gallery. His photographs also have been
shown at the Pompidou Center in Paris, the St. Louis Art
Museum, and the Institute for Contemporary Art in London.
Selections of his photographs are collected in the books
''Robert Mapplethorpe Photographs'' (Norfolk, Va., 1978),
''Lady: Lisa Lyon'' (Viking 1983), ''Robert Mapplethorpe:
Certain People'' (Twelvetrees Press, 1985) and ''Robert
Mapplethorpe,'' the catalogue to the Whitney Museum's 1988
exhibition.
Mr. Mapplethorpe is survived by his parents, Harry and Joan
Mapplethorpe, of Floral Park, Queens; two sisters, Nancy
Rooney, of Bay Shore, L.I., and Susan Schneider, of Munsey
Park, N.Y.; and two brothers, James, of Dix Hills, L.I., and
Ed, of New York City.
A memorial service is being planned, according to Mr.
Mapplethorpe's lawyer, Michael Stout.
---
Photo: http://www.american-buddha.com/amapnew42.jpg
His work: http://db1.fotocommunity.de/neu/pic/81/1093881.jpg
http://www.postmodern.com/~fi/pattipics/images/only.jpg (Patti Smith
1)
http://www.deutsche-bank-kunst.com/guggenheim/assets/images/mapplethor
pe_02.jpg (2)
http://www.masters-of-photography.com/images/screen/mapplethorpe/mappl
ethorpe_joe.jpg (Joe)
http://www.graphicstudio.usf.edu/GFX/Mapplethorpe_Robert/mapplec.jpg
(untitled)
http://www.evelynaimisfineart.com/evelynaimisfineart/pictures/prints&m
ultiples/mapplethorpe.jpg (Icarus)
http://www.kahome.co.uk/mappl_pt.jpg (Parrot Tulips)
http://www.carnegiemuseums.org/cmag/bk_issue/2003/marapr/feat2_files/i
mage005.gif (Louise Nevelson)
http://www.mapplethorpe.org/img/female_7.jpg (Female)
FROM: The Independent (March 14th 1989) ~
By Philip Core
Robert Mapplethorpe, photographer, born New York 4 November
1946, died Boston 9 March 1989.
The appeal of photography being, in large part, that of
autobiography, Robert Mapplethorpe was a pivotal figure in
the emergence of that vexed art as an epitome of our epoch.
Like most good autobiographers, he was selective about what
he showed the public, displaying a Puckish sense of humour
about the effect of his images; indeed, the faun-like
persona he presented in many self-portraits revealed as much
a naughty boy as the enfant terrible conceived by the media.
These self-portraits, which may be said to originate with
the famous underground film Robert Having His Nipple Pierced
(1968) as artefacts of the Warhol world, continue from the
earliest images of a goateed satyr, through the black-clad
art-dandy of the Seventies, to the leather-bound muscleboy
using himself as a tool for pleasure and art, and culminate
in the brave confrontational image - of himself in the last
stages of Aids, published last month in Vanity Fair.
This backbone of work, self-regarding and self-promoting,
contains the man himself. Portrait images - from his friend
Patti Smith, through Warhol, Snowdon, Louise Bourgeois,
Marisol, Philip Johnson, the gay artist Tom of Finland, Lisa
Lyons - all parallel Mapplethorpe's development as an
artist. It is almost accidental that his interests, the
unquestioning narcissism with which he dwelled on them, and
the reclame they attracted in thrill- conscious New York,
were all avatars of avant-garde taste over the last 15
years. Mapplethorpe lived and died a man of his time, the
era of sexual freedom, artistic experiment, and media
sensationalism. But was he what he seemed?
Trained in Fine Arts at New York's Pratt Institute,
Mapplethorpe was, at first, a not very successful sculptor
with an interest in framing; sleek pentagrams and trapezoids
in lacquered wood and glass would accompany his more
outrageous photographs in shows of the early Eighties. From
the beginning, a sense of design brought severity and
elegance to his armoury of talents.
Diving into the early Seventies circle loosely centred on
Warhol's Factory studio, Mapplethorpe was automatically
exposed to a certain sensibility best described as Alternate
Fashion, which, however notorious it may have been for drugs
and sexual anomaly, was nevertheless firmly oriented towards
worldly success and aesthetic achievement.
At the same time he explored the world of leather bars, S&M
sexuality and euphoric self-discovery which characterised
American gays, after the Stonewall riots in 1969 brought
them out of the closet. During this quintessentially New
York youth, Mapplethorpe shared a flat with singer/poet
Patti Smith; together they personified the thin, febrile,
shiny black silhouette of the urban hip that became an
international preoccupation in the late Seventies.
All of these elements combined in a character not as
deliberate as many journalists seem to have believed.
Mapplethorpe took for granted the pros and cons of the world
he inhabited, seeing his friends, his taste (which ran to
out-of-fashion American Mission furniture and Dore-like
diabolical bronzes), and his talents as components of a
microscope cheerfully focused on change in his society. At
first, photography was an aspect of taste to him: it
produced elegant small 'art objects' made of collaged porno
photos and polaroids sleekly framed and glazed with red
tissue-paper. The photographs of Patti Smith date from this
period.
Under the influence of Dianne Arbus - New York's legendary
confronter of the bizarre and sexually threatening - he
began to document the quirky world of his sexual partners,
producing domestic interiors with S&M home- owners viewed
deadpan, as well as the famous image of a black man's cock
hanging out of a polyester business suit. Then, in the
mid-Seventies, he took up with Sam Wagstaff.
This was a love-affair and it made Mapplethorpe's career.
Wagstaff was a wealthy WASP, whose private tastes ran to
mysticism and sexual kink. He was fascinated by
Mapplethorpe's pictures of previously unexplored territory;
he began what became an unrivalled collection of historic
photographs; and he backed Mapplethorpe, introducing him to
Robert Miller for his first major show (1979). Together
these two men, both handsome and uninhibited, both connected
to many contrasting social worlds, both endowed with a keen
if peculiar aesthetic sense, were able, over nearly a
decade, to promote photography, and a certain studio taste
for stark furniture, black and white decor and artistic
curiosities (skulls, slave-collars, crystal balls) into a
recognisable taste emulated by many people.
The roots of such style lay, in part, in the American
photographic tradition featured by Stieglitz's galleries;
partly in the underground taste of S&M aficionados
worldwide; and partly in New York's own tradition of elegant
interior decoration.
Mapplethorpe's photographs reflected the increased affluence
of his situation, including matt grey backgrounds, isolated
props, profile compositions - and a luxurious objectivity.
He posed black bodies and leather-jacketed torsos,
knife-brandishing arms and even himself auto-sodomised with
a bullwhip in the format of decorative still-life. The
resultant images were beautifully lit, luminously printed,
and frightening in their sedate directness.
Photographs of Lisa Lyons, the weightlifter, and of many
society figures led directly to numerous studies of flowers,
which - perhaps referring to Georgia O'Keeffe - assimilated
all the sexuality and all the stylishness of his other work.
They also reflected the swing away from wild self-indulgence
which Aids had begun to create. Mapplethorpe was an early
victim of the disease, who nevertheless persevered in his
work, achieving major retrospectives at the Whitney Museum
(1988) and at the National Portrait Gallery in London
(1988), and finishing with a self- revealing series of
portraits published just before his death.
Of all things, Mapplethorpe was most clearly one of those
for whom, Gautier said, 'the visible world exists'. He
exulted in certain kinds of flesh and light, certain forms
of love and laughter, and he made from these enthusiasms an
unforgettable art which dignified the camera's trivial
voyeurism. At the end he had the dignity to use his fame in
an attempt to obviate smirking apathy about Aids. He was a
true original.
--
Robert Mapplethorpe Online:
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/mapplethorpe_robert.html