Robert Mapplethorpe was born in 1946 in Floral Park, Queens. Of his
childhood he said, "I come from suburban America. It was a very safe
environment and it was a good place to come from in that it was a good
place to leave."
In 1963, Mapplethorpe enrolled at Pratt Institute in nearby Brooklyn,
where he studied drawing, painting, and sculpture. Influenced by artists
such as Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp, he also experimented with
various materials in mixed-media collages, including images cut from
books and magazines. He acquired a Polaroid camera in 1970 and began
producing his own photographs to incorporate into the collages, saying
he felt "it was more honest." That same year he and Patti Smith, whom he
had met three years earlier, moved into the Chelsea Hotel. Mapplethorpe quickly found satisfaction taking Polaroid photographs in
their own right and indeed few Polaroids actually appear in his
mixed-media works. In 1973, the Light Gallery in New York City mounted
his first solo gallery exhibition, "Polaroids." Two years later he
acquired a Hasselblad medium-format camera and began shooting his circle
of friends and acquaintances—artists, musicians, socialites,
pornographic film stars, and members of the S & M underground. He
also worked on commercial projects, creating album cover art for Patti
Smith and Television and a series of portraits and party pictures for Interview Magazine.
In the late 70s, Mapplethorpe grew increasingly interested in
documenting the New York S & M scene. The resulting photographs are
shocking for their content and remarkable for their technical and formal
mastery. Mapplethorpe told ARTnews in late 1988, "I don't like
that particular word 'shocking.' I'm looking for the unexpected. I'm
looking for things I've never seen before … I was in a position to take
those pictures. I felt an obligation to do them." Meanwhile his career
continued to flourish. In 1977, he participated in Documenta 6 in
Kassel, West Germany and in 1978, the Robert Miller Gallery in New York
City became his exclusive dealer.
Mapplethorpe met Lisa Lyon, the first World Women's Bodybuilding
Champion, in 1980. Over the next several years they collaborated on a
series of portraits and figure studies, a film, and the book, Lady, Lisa Lyon.
Throughout the 80s, Mapplethorpe produced a bevy of images that
simultaneously challenge and adhere to classical aesthetic standards:
stylized compositions of male and female nudes, delicate flower still
lifes, and studio portraits of artists and celebrities, to name a few of
his preferred genres. He introduced and refined different techniques
and formats, including color 20" x 24" Polaroids, photogravures,
platinum prints on paper and linen, Cibachrome and dye transfer color
prints. In 1986, he designed sets for Lucinda Childs' dance performance,
Portraits in Reflection, created a photogravure series for Arthur Rimbaud's A Season in Hell, and was commissioned by curator Richard Marshall to take portraits of New York artists for the series and book, 50 New York Artists.
That same year, in 1986, he was diagnosed with AIDS. Despite his
illness, he accelerated his creative efforts, broadened the scope of his
photographic inquiry, and accepted increasingly challenging
commissions. The Whitney Museum of American Art mounted his first major
American museum retrospective in 1988, one year before his death in
1989.
His vast, provocative, and powerful body of work has established him as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. Today Mapplethorpe is represented by galleries in North and South America and Europe and his work can be found in the collections of major museums around the world. Beyond the art historical and social significance of his work, his legacy lives on through the work of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. He established the Foundation in 1988 to promote photography, support museums that exhibit photographic art, and to fund medical research in the fight against AIDS and HIV-related infection. (Source: Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation)
