Twenty-five years after a landmark trial over exhibiting Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs, the debate about what can be shown in museums has shifted from his explicitly sexual works to images of young children. The joint exhibition devoted to the late US photographer at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) and the city’s J. Paul Getty Museum in March will show photographs from Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio, which includes a provocative self-portrait with a bullwhip, but not two controversial images of children.
So why did Britt Salvesen, the Lacma curator behind the show, decide that the exhibition would not include the two images of children that were part of the 1990 Mapplethorpe obscenity case? “I thought long and hard about whether that was self-censorship,” she says. “But after testing the thematic sequence of the exhibition, I decided that the works are not crucial to an understanding of Mapplethorpe as an artist.” Both images will be included in the catalogue, however, which documents the 2,000-work Mapplethorpe photograph collection jointly acquired by the Getty and Lacma in 2011.
Salvesen says that advances in civil rights in the US have encouraged a “greater acceptance of explicitly sexual work”. The X Portfolio was also part of the trial and will be displayed at the end of the Getty exhibition in a specially designed gallery, although the photographs should, chronologically, appear at the start. “I thought that if I put that work in the first gallery, people would be put off,” explains the Getty curator Paul Martineau, adding that Mapplethorpe himself said: “One must ease the public into it—that’s an art in itself.” Martineau says he had to come to terms with his own personal reaction to the work before he could approach it professionally. “One of the things I thought was, ‘My parents are going to see this show—how am I going to explain it to them?’"
A storm of controversy broke out in the US in 1990 over The Perfect Moment, a touring posthumous show of Mapplethorpe’s work. The Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati found itself in the national spotlight when it took on conservative groups bent on branding his work as pornography. A court found the institution and its then director, Dennis Barrie, not guilty of obscenity charges. In 1989, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, backed out of staging The Perfect Moment at the last minute. Jock Reynolds, then the executive director of the Washington Project for the Arts, stepped in and arranged for his institution to host the show. He says there is still “a lot of anxiety” about what museums are willing to show, although some display “great courage” to present provocative work. “What isn’t talked about that much is the quiet self-censorship,” he says. Meanwhile, an exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center called After the Moment: Reflections on Robert Mapplethorpe (until 13 March) looks at the artistic legacy of the original show.
• Robert Mapplethorpe: the Perfect Medium, J. Paul Getty Museum and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 15 March-31 July