Robert Mapplethorpe was born on November 4th, 1946. He is an American photographer, known for his sensitive yet blunt treatment of controversial subject matter. He is known for his large-scale, highly stylized black and white medium of photography. His work featured an array of subjects, including celebrity portraits, male and female nudes, self-portraits and still-life images of flowers.
Mapplethorpe was born in Floral Park, Queens, New York City, to Joan Dorothy and Harry Irving Mapplethorpe. He was of English, Irish, and German descent, and grew up as a Roman Catholic in Our Lady of the Snows Parish. He grew up with a rather large family consisting of five brothers and sisters. Robert Mapplethorpe studied for a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he majored in Graphic Arts. Before finishing his degree, he actually dropped out in 1969. He lived with his close friend Patti Smith from 1967 to 1972, and she supported him financially by working in bookstores. They began to create art together. Though Robert Mapplethorpe realized he was a homosexual, they maintained a close relationship.
From 1977 until 1980, Mapplethorpe was the love of writer and Drummer magazine editor Jack Fritscher. He took his first photographs in the late 1960s and early 1970s using a Polariod camera. In the mid-1970s, he acquired a Hasselblad medium-format camera and began taking photographs of a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, including artists, composers, and socialites. During this time, he became friends with New Orleans artist George Dureau, whose work had a profound impact on Mapplethorpe, so much so that he restaged many of Dureau’s early photographs. By the 1980s, his subject matter focused on statuesque male and female nudes, delicate flower still life, and highly formal portraits of artists and celebrities. Mapplethorpe’s first studio was at 24 Bond Street in Manhattan. In the 1980s, his mentor and lifetime companion art curator Sam Wagstaff brought a top-floor loft at 35 West 23rd Street for Robert, where he lived and used as his shooting space. He kept the Bond Street loft as his darkroom. In 1988, Mapplethorpe selected Patricia Morrisroe to write his biography, which was based on 300 interviews with celebrities, critics, lovers, and Mapplethorpe himself.
Mapplethorpe died on the morning of March 9th, 1989 at the age of 52 due to complications from HIV/AIDS, in a Boston Massachusetts hospital. His corpse was cremated and his ashes are interred at St. John’s Cemetry, Queens in New York, at his mother’s grave-site, etched “Maxey.”
About a year before his death, the ailing Mapplethorpe helped found the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, INC. His vision for the foundation was that it would be “the appropriate vehicle to protect his work, to advance his creative vision, and to promote the causes he cared about.” Since his death, the Foundation has not only functioned as his official estate and helped promote his work throughout the world, but has also raised and donated millions of dollars to fund medical research in the fight against AIDS and HIV infection. The Foundation also determines which galleries represent Mapplethorpe’s art.
Mapplethorpe worked primarily in a studio, and almost exclusively in black and white, with the exception of some of his later work and his final exhibit “New Colors.” His body of work features a wide range of subjects, but his main focus and the greater part of his work is erotic imagery. He would refer to some of his own work as pornographic, with the aim of arousing the viewer, but which could also be regarded as high art, a concept used by societies to describe art that is created by a culturally renowned artist and is not accessible to lower classes. His erotic art explored a wide range of sexual subjects, depicting the BDSM subculture of New York in the 1970s, portrayals of black male nudes, and classical nudes of female bodybuilders. Mapplethorpe was a participant observer for much of his erotic photography, participating and engaging his models sexually.
Other subjects included flowers, especially orchids and calla lilies, children, statues, and celebrities, including Andy Warhol, Louise Bourgeois, Deborah Harry, Richard Gere, Peter Gabriel, Grace Jones, Amanda Lear Laurie Anderson, Joan Armatrading, and Patti Smith. Smith was a longtime roommate of Mapplethorpe and a frequent subject in his photography, indluing a stark, iconic photograph that appears on the cover of Smith’s first album, Horses. His work often made reference to religious or classical imagery.
The Perfect Moment was the most comprehensive retrospective works by Mapplethorpe. The show spanned twenty-five years of his career, featured celebrity portraits, self-portraits, interracial figure studies, floral still life, homoerotic images, and collages. The exhibition, organized by Janet Kardon of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Philadelphia, opened in the winter of 1988 just month before Mapplethorpe’s death. On tour, in the summer of 1989, the exhibition became the centerpiece of a controversy concerning federal funding of the arts and censorship.
The Perfect Moment covered all aspects of the photographer’s career from the late 1960s to 1988. The traveling exhibition had been scheduled to appear at five other museums in various regions of the country during the next year and a half. It included more than 150 images. Despite the controversial character of some of the photographs, ritical response was enthusiastic and attendance was robust throughout the show’s Philadelphia run. The exhibition grouped photos into three categories: rigorously conceived portraits and figure studies, dramatically lit flower arrangements in color (and in black and white), and photographs of gay sadomasochism that left nothing left to the imagination. Images that sparked the most controversy include Jim and Tom, Sausalito, Man in a Polyester Suit, Jesse McBride, and Rosie. Rosie, a black and white portrait of a very young girl crouched down on a bench outdoors with part of her dress lifted, exposing her genitals, generated controversy because of the subject’s age and the issue of consent.
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