Why are Robert Mapplethorpe's images everywhere?

When photographer Robert Mapplethorpe was diagnosed with AIDS in 1986 at the age of 40, his immediate reaction was to destroy the work he would leave behind. After overcoming the initial shock, however, he decided to plan his estate, which led to the creation of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation in 1988, a year before his death. “Robert was smart in choosing his board because he knew that naming family members or life partners who might make emotional decisions is not always optimal for managing an artist’s legacy,” Michael Stout, attorney and president of the Mapplethorpe Foundation, told ARTnews. Instead, Mapplethorpe assembled a board with professional expertise in both law (Stout is a copyright expert) and photography to shape the future and legacy of his stunning body of work.

Stout estimates that Mapplethorpe left behind about 14,000 prints, made from about 2,000 negatives, as well as a smaller number of sculptural objects and Polaroids. And in recent years, managing the artist’s legacy has become a complex feat: 15 galleries around the world manage sales of the estate based on their respective geography. Gladstone Gallery, Morán Morán and Olga Korper Gallery are among the five responsible in North America; in Europe, Xavier Hufkins Gallery, Thaddaeus Ropac, Alison Jacques Gallery and Galerie Thomas Schulte are half of the eight galleries that have representation agreements; South American demand is managed by Galeria Fortes D'Aloia & Gabriel, from Brazil; and the Asian market is managed by Kukje Gallery, from Seoul.

Next week at Art Basel, Gladstone Gallery, Ropac and Alison Jacques will each have a Mapplethorpe work for sale. In addition, there are several institutional exhibitions each year and brand partnerships, such as those with Uniqlo, Chrome Hearts and Honey Fucking Dijon, which license Mapplethorpe’s images. In the early days, the foundation only licensed paper products, such as postcards, calendars and posters. “We had no way of knowing if Robert would like a Chrome Hearts leather jacket, but we did it, just as many artists were starting to do licensing deals,” Stout added.

“We have to make careful decisions about licensing and be meticulous about publishing because books survive,” Stout said. “They’re not as popular in terms of sales anymore with everything online, but Robert knew it was important to have them and he did a lot of books with different publishers.” He added that the foundation’s trustees have agreed to be “conservative about licensing” and to “make decisions that we think he would have made.”
In addition to managing Mapplethorpe’s art, the foundation has a lesser-known mission, acting as a grant-making entity invested in supporting HIV research. “We rely heavily on gallery sales, and managing a photographer’s estate is more challenging than managing a painter’s,” he said, given the vast price difference between the two mediums.

The intriguing and enigmatic léMapplethorpe’s visual magic, however, has perhaps been more popular than ever in recent years. The first quarter of 2024 has already seen four solo exhibitions of the photographer: at Alison Jacques in London, Gladstone in New York, Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris and Morán Morán in Los Angeles, as well as a three-artist show, with Ann Craven and Mohammed Z. Rahman, at Phillida Reid in London. The Paris and L.A. exhibitions were curated by high-profile fashion editor Edward Enninful and artist Jacolby Satterwhite, respectively. Last month, the Currier Museum of Art in New Hampshire opened the exhibition Filippo de Pisis and Robert Mapplethorpe, which places the photographer’s work in dialogue with that of the 20th-century Italian painter. Their shared fascination with flowers anchors the show, which features 38 photographs, all on loan from the foundation.

The Gladstone show, which closed in April at the gallery’s Upper East Side headquarters, sought to shed light on a lesser-known part of Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre, his three-dimensional assemblages and photographs in sculptural frames. The show benefited from the gallery space’s former life as a home, as the installation conveyed a low-key mix of theatricality and domesticity. His “Untitled (Coat Rack Sculpture), ca. 1972, for example, occupied a corner with a lit lamp (in lieu of a coat) adjacent to a black-and-white photograph by the artist Jay Johnson, in which the same sculpture appears next to Johnson’s nude body. Opposite a window overlooking the backyard was “Open Book” (1974), a large aluminum floor-standing structure in which a quartet of penis photographs sits above an elegant triangular base.

The recent Gladstone exhibition followed the Guggenheim Museum’s yearlong exhibition, “Implicit Tensions” (2019), which presented a sizable group of Mapplethorpe’s mixed-media constructions for the first time. The ambitious undertaking was an extension of the foundation’s 1993 gift of 194 works to the Guggenheim, which also established a photography department at the museum and a gallery named in honor of the late photographer.

“Before Mapplethorpe, the frames of photographs were more incidental, reflecting the uncomfortable transition from paper to wall,” Guggenheim associate curator Lauren Hinkson recently told ARTnews about the two-part exhibition. The second part of her project invited living artists including Lyle Ashton Harris, Glenn Ligon, Zanele Muholi, and Catherine Opie to exhibit their own images of queer resilience as a response to the first part of the exhibition. “Like the work of any canonical figure, Mapplethorpe’s work and its meanings are neither stable nor static, but are continually open to reinterpretation as other artists offer alternative approaches to image-making,” Hinkson said.

New-generation queer creatives, on the other hand, still find inspiration in Mapplethorpe’s uninhibited treatment of carnality, whether in his allusive florals or the dramatic lighting of double-fisted rears. Ludovic de Saint Sernin, a rising French designer with a cult following, unveiled his Mapplethorpe-inspired menswear collection in collaboration with the foundation during New York Fashion Week in February. Pop star Troye Sivan is currently wearing pieces from the bondage-inspired collection on his ongoing Sweat world tour. The leather-heavy garments are a departure from Uniqlo’s 2015 T-shirt line, which was printed with the artist’s more accessible photographs.

Inviting new perspectives has been a profitable way for the Mapplethorpe Foundation to keep its legacy alive. A series of gallery exhibitions curated by cultural luminaries from Isabelle Huppert to Elton John or the recent Enninful and Satterwhite, activate their major work through different personal lenses. (The exhibition Enninful curated at Ropac attracted about 2,000 visitors on its opening day in March.)

For Satterwhite, the opportunity to curate a Mapplethorpe exhibition resonates with his own practice, which also traverses themes of power, autonomy, and euphoria. The foundation gave the Brooklyn-based artist access to the photographer’s entire oeuvre, and the resulting exhibition, titled “Animism, Faith, Violence, and Conquest,” included a mix of Mapplethorpe’s lesser-explored images of utopia, resistance, and devotion. The show’s titular themes are subjects Satterwhite explored about belief systems and survival while working on his recent Metropolitan Museum of Art commission, A Metta Prayer (2023).

A photograph from 1982, for example, shows a television with a chain hanging from its bottom; a 1985 image includes a boy dressed as a pirate looking through a spyglass. “I was thinking about how to subvert video games and ideas of violence, surveillance and conquest in my project,” Satterwhite told ARTnews. He noted that he has long dreamed of doing a project around Mapplethorpe, “but if I had the chance 10 years ago, it would have turned out very differently,” he said. Organizing the exhibition on the heels of his Met commission, in which he marinated similar ideas of devotion, power and toxicity in beauty, the artist said he felt closer to Mapplethorpe’s similar concerns at this point in his practice.

Mapplethorpe’s own gallery representation has been important in changing perspectives on the artist’s work. “The dominant aesthetic of Robert’s estate, with lilies and nudes, was established by the foundation and the Robert Miller Gallery, which initially had exclusive representation,” said Stout, the foundation’s president. The foundation’s shift in representation to Sean Kelly’s New York gallery in the early 2000s helped bring a more multivalent approach to Mapplethorpe. In 2003, with Sean Kelly’s help, Cindy Sherman organized the first of these artist-directed curatorial projects that now take place several times a year. “The public reaction and a review by Roberta Smith in the New York Times convinced us that we should let other people make decisions about exhibitions,” Stout said. “Even we still see works in this way that we have never seen or have forgotten.”

The challenge for the Mapplethorpe Foundation today is managing an enterprise funded by a finite repertoire. In an effort to monitor sales at various price points and avoid showing the same work simultaneously in separate exhibitions, the foundation has established what it internally calls “a central system.” The layout helps the board and staff divide and track the types of images sold around the globe and maintain a balanced inventory in terms of value and future demand. Works with exceptionally iconic subjects, such as Patti Smith, Mapplethorpe himself or Andy Warhol, as well as lilies, are “for more special moments,” Stout said. This system also helps the foundation shuffle works between different gallery inventories for even distribution.

“When we started the foundation with Robert, we weren’t sure if we would continue for more than 20 years,” Stout recalled. “We don’t have trustees making emotional decisions and holding sentimental pieces on our board — we just want to put everything right.”

Source: Artnews