Much of the critical writing about the visual impact of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs, particularly those that show the extreme S&M practices of gay men, discusses the division between style and content. Arthur Danto opens his essay “Playing with the Edge”, written for the first major posthumous book of Mapplethorpe’s photographs (1992), with this idea: “There is a tension at the heart of Mapplethorpe’s art, verging on paradox, between its most distinctive content and its mode of presentation. The content of the work is often sufficiently erotic to be considered pornographic, even by the artist, while the aesthetic of its presentation is chastely classic—it is Dionysiac and Apollonian at once.”
Contrast and division plays out in other ways too: between black and white—not only the pearlescent whites and deep velvet blacks of his prints (made not by Mapplethorpe, but by his printer, Tom Baril), but also between white skin and black, which Mapplethorpe much preferred because, as his biographer Patricia Morrisroe explains, black skin had “the colour of bronze”. There was division too in his uptown and downtown lifestyles—a black-tie dinner given by his patron, Sam Wagstaff, followed by a night at the Mine Shaft, the members-only gay club with dungeons and “glory holes” through which men could masturbate an anonymous partner. One subject about which there was no ambiguity was his desire for fame and a legacy. But here too was a tension: would the more lasting legacy be his art or the story of his life?
These discussions continue in two new books published to accompany the first major exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s work since his archive was jointly acquired from the Mapplethorpe Foundation (set up by the photographer a year before his death in 1989) by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2011. Neither is strictly an exhibition catalogue; both go beyond those limits to study the archive in greater depth. The Photographs, the more elegantly designed and printed, concentrates on the prints that form the core of the collection. The Archive is funkier and more scrapbook-like in concept and design, and opens with a personal memoir of their time together, written by Mapplethorpe’s former girlfriend and soulmate, the poet and songwriter Patti Smith.
This book, with its wealth of associated materials, supplies the visually chaotic back-story to Mapplethorpe’s life and work. “I was a 21-year-old hippie with bells around my ankles popping acid twice a week,” reads a scribbled page torn from a notebook, headed “4th year college”, and “summer of love”. It was 1967, Mapplethorpe was an art student at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, it was the year “Patti walked in off the street” and they moved in together.
The chapters on his pre-photographic works of art include the altar-like installations that combined crucifixes, pentagrams and swathes of black cloth; spray-painted collages of torsos and penises clipped from pornographic and “physique” magazines; assemblages—crude “ready-mades” incorporating ties, T-shirts, Y-fronts, jockstraps and jeans (which prompted Smith’s oft-quoted query: “Can I wear this, or is it art?”).
Britt Salvesen cites artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, whose “practices… were simultaneously high and low, disciplined and messy, glamorous and grungy”, as supplying Mapplethorpe with “the validation he needed to develop a visual lexicon from his own obsessions”. After borrowing a Polaroid camera from Sandy Daley, his neighbour at the Chelsea Hotel, he decided that photography was the medium that could allow him to present those obsessions as art.
Mapplethorpe’s approach was the same, whether for portraits, male nudes, flowers, sex pictures or marble statues. “Right from the beginning,” he told Gary Indiana in 1988, “before I knew much about photography, I had the same eyes. When I first started taking pictures the vision was there.”
In The Photographs, Richard Meyer quotes an exchange between Mapplethorpe and Janet Kardon, curator of The Perfect Moment, the exhibition that was embroiled in a battle over US national arts funding and led to an obscenity trial in Cincinnati in 1990, to illustrate Mapplethorpe’s cool, non-discriminatory point of view. “You bestow elegance on a subject one would never consider as elegant,” Kardon says, “in the photographs of the cocks, for example. One might not say a cock was elegant.” “I might,” Mapplethorpe replies.
By his own admission, Mapplethorpe was not interested in women’s bodies. He was, as Danto writes, a “participant observer”: he was interested in sex, in beautiful men, whom he desired and wanted to photograph.
Viewed from this distance, some of Mapplethorpe’s best-known photographs have accrued a patina of familiarity and been defused by fame. In its style, Mapplethorpe’s controlled perfectionism always recalled the works of earlier photographers—Drtikol, perhaps, or even Man Ray. He knew and collected historic photographs and later knew Wagstaff’s fine collection. And though a famous Mapplethorpe image can make a staggeringly high price at auction (last October at Sotheby’s in New York, his 1980 picture, Man in Polyester Suit, sold for $478,000), contemporary art photography did not follow his lead. It was the work of artists such as Jeff Wall and Stephen Shore, Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth that influenced subsequent generations.
Jonathan Katz, in his essay Queer Classicism in The Photographs, argues that style and content worked in concert, not opposition: “The two widely assumed poles of Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre—formal perfection on the one hand and sexual provocation on the other—are in fact twinned, if not actually the same thing.” The “eroticism is a function of its classicism and vice versa”. This goes further than merely bestowing on pornography an acceptable aesthetic. For Katz, “Mapplethorpe’s most lasting impact as an artist was his redrawing of the boundary line of the aesthetic to include that which had previously been excluded from it.”
It was Luc Sante who observed that after the onslaught by the senator Jesse Helms, and the Cincinnati trial, it is almost impossible to see Mapplethorpe’s work without the politics of gay liberation obstructing the view. But for generations who are its beneficiaries, these two books illustrate how violently contested the struggle was.
Mapplethorpe did not make work that was intentionally political – he was too selfish, he said, for that – but the photographs he made, his desire to have them exhibited, valued, collected and published, played an important role in the acceptance of sexual difference. When gay marriage is a given in most Western societies, and the rights of LGBT and non-binary genders are supported by the American president, his distinctive body of late 20th-century art is a potent reminder of how far we have come.
• Liz Jobey is an editor and writer, principally on photography. She is the associate editor of the Financial Times’ Weekend Magazine
• Robert Mapplethorpe: the Perfect Medium,
J. Paul Getty Museum and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (until 31 July)
Robert Mapplethorpe: the Photographs
Paul Martineau and Britt Salvesen, with essays by Richard Meyer, Philip Gefter, Jonathan Katz, Ryan Linkof and Carol Squiers
Getty Publications in association with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 340pp, £40, $59.95 (hb)
Robert Mapplethorpe: the Archive
Frances Terpak and Michelle Brunnick, with essays by Patti Smith and Jonathan Weinberg
Getty Research Institute, 240pp, £32.50, $49.95 (hb)