Robert Mapplethorpe is known for his magnificent black-and-white portraits that challenge his audience. Robert Mapplethorpe's career flourished in the 1980s with commercial projects, creating album covers for Patti Smith and the band Television, as well as a series of portraits and party photos for Interview Magazine. After being diagnosed with AIDS in 1986, he accelerated his creative efforts and took on increasingly ambitious projects. In 1988, a year before his death, he had his first major exhibition at The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
The Portrait of Robert Mapplethorpe
Robert Mapplethorpe was born in 1946 in Queens, New York. At sixteen, he enrolled at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he studied drawing, painting, and sculpture. Early in his career, Robert Mapplethorpe was influenced by a number of artists, including Joseph Cornell and the Dadaists. Marcel Duchamp, He experimented with various techniques, including collage. In 1970, he purchased a Polaroid camera to take photographs and simultaneously use collages. He had his first solo exhibition in 1973 at the Light Gallery in New York, called Polaroids. Two years later, Mapplethorpe purchased a more sophisticated Hasselblad medium-format camera and began photographing the people he knew: artists, musicians, pornographic film stars, and other members of the New York underground scene. Regardless of who was photographing, all the images are characterized by Mapplethorpe's style—his relentless pursuit of flawless beauty. The powerful bodies photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe remind the audience of classical Greek sculptures, following the rules of symmetry and geometry employed by classical sculptors.
Many of his portraits in the 1980s were of prominent figures in the arts, such as Truman Capote, William Burroughs and Andy Warhol, and his portraits can be seen as a reflection of the New York 'cultural scene' of the time. In 1980, Robert Mapplethorpe met Lisa Lyon, the first female world bodybuilding champion, and they worked together on several portraits and figure studies, including full-body and fragmented images. During this time, he also photographed the male figure, of athletic African-American men, including models, dancers, and bodybuilders, all with muscular, well-defined bodies. Robert Mapplethorpe stated, "I concentrate on the part of the body that I consider the most perfect part of that particular model." In 1984, he photographed Grace Jones, the Jamaican-American singer, songwriter, model, and actress known for her androgynous appearance and provocative behavior, and a prominent figure in the New York art and social scene. In the photograph, Grace Jones is wearing body paint created by the artist. Keith Haring.
Self-portrait: Identity
While images of the body are associated with ideals of beauty, portraiture is often associated with identity and individuality. Self-portraits are perhaps the most complex type of portrait because the artist and the model are the same person, and the image has a personal feel, like a diary. Mapplethorpe experimented with different aspects of his identity by presenting himself in various guises, from a knife-wielding bandit to a transvestite. In the book Certain People: A Book of Portraits 14 (1985), Mapplethorpe quotes that his self-portraits express the most confident part of him. The cover image of this book is the work Self Portrait 1980, where the artist portrays himself with a black leather jacket, dark shirt, cigarette in the corner of his mouth, cold gaze, and a 1950s hairstyle, reminiscent of Hollywood icons James Dean in the film Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones (1953).
Robert Mapplethorpe and AIDS
In 1986, Robert Mapplethorpe was diagnosed with AIDS, the syndrome caused by HIV. The HIV/AIDS pandemic was one of the most significant international events of the 1980s and affected the lives of many of Mapplethorpe's friends and associates. At the time, most people diagnosed with the disease did not survive more than two years. Mapplethorpe's self-portrait at the end of his life reflected his poor health, his search for freedom, his suffering, and his mortality.
Today, Mapplethorpe's work can be found in the collections of major museums around the world, and his legacy lives on through the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. The Foundation was established in 1988 to promote photography, support museums exhibiting photographic art, and fund medical research in the fight against AIDS and HIV-related infections.
