Who was Robert Mapplethorpe?
Robert Mapplethorpe is known for his magnificent black and white portraits, which challenge his audience. Robert Mapplethorpe's career blossomed 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 (AIDS) in 1986, he accelerated his creative efforts and carried out 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 Dadaist artist Marcel Duchamp, experimenting with techniques such as collage. In 1970, he bought a Polaroid camera to take pictures and use collages at the same time. He has his first individual exhibition, in 1973 at the Light Gallery in New York, called Polaroids. Two years later, Mapplethorpe bought a more sophisticated medium-format Hasselblad 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 photographed, all images are characterized by Mapplethorpe's style – his relentless pursuit of flawless beauty. The powerful bodies photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe remind audiences of classical Greek sculpture, while following the rules of symmetry and geometry that classical sculptors used.
Much of his portraits in the 1980s were of prominent figures in the arts such as Truman Capote, William Burroughs and Andy Warhol, and their portraits can be seen as a reflection of New York's 'cultural scene' at that time. In 1980, Robert Mapplethorpe met Lisa Lyon, the first world champion female bodybuilder, and they worked together on a variety of portraits and figure studies, including full-body and fragmentary images. During that 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 focus on the part of the body that I feel is the most perfect part on 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, being a prominent figure in the New York art and social scene. In the photograph, Grace Jones is with body paint created by the artist Keith Haring.
Self-portrait: Identity
While body images are associated with ideals of beauty, the portrait 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 thug to a cross-dresser. In the book Certain People: A Book of Portraits 14 1985, there is a quote from Mapplethorpe referring that his self-portraits express the most self-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 coat, dark shirt, cigarette in the corner of his mouth, cold gaze and a hairstyle from the 1950s, reminds us of the 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 Mapplethorpe friends and associates. At the time, most people diagnosed with the disease did not survive more than two years. Mapplethorpe's self-portrait towards the end of his life reflected his poor health, his quest for freedom, his suffering and his mortality. Today Mapplethorpe's work can be found in the collections of the world's leading museums and his legacy lives on through the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. The Foundation was established in 1988 to promote photography, support museums that exhibit photographic art, and fund medical research in the fight against AIDS and HIV-related infections.
#lgbt