 Robert MapplethorpeRobert Mapplethorpe
Robert Mapplethorpe
By Roberto Franzoni
Robert Mapplethorpe was one of the finest and most extreme photographers ever to appear on the world photography scene.
His extraordinary nudes are excessive to the point of being scandalous. But once the initial impression of morbidity has worn off, they elicit the viewer’s admiration and astonishment by an ideal of beauty with classical overtones through their perfect, suffused use of black and white.
Mapplethorpe was born in New York in 1946, grew up in a middle-class Catholic family and attended the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he soon discovered his passion for photography.
In the 1970s, the years when Andy Warhol and his Factory were at the height of their fame, he began producing his first photographs.
He used a Polaroid to portray himself (his self-portrait at the opening of the exhibition), his lovers and friends, including the singer Patti Smith.
They had a close relationship and she was to appear in many subsequent works.
In this early phase of his career, Robert focused on bodies and studied them in their physicality and tactility, as did Michelangelo and Leonardo.
In the 1980s, Mapplethorpe heightened his representations of the body and the extreme sexuality related to it, using primarily African-American models, not professionals, with sculpted, sinuous bodies. But he also portrayed women like the body-builder Lisa Lyon.
The influence of masters like Man Ray and Von Gloeden were strong, but Robert also learned to carve with light, the way a sculptor does with a scalpel.
In this period he also intensified his provocative and enveloping depictions of flowers.
In his pictures of orchids, whether in black and white or color, the flowers look like richly sensuous and hungry mouths.
Mapplethorpe's admiration for the ideals of the Renaissance did not prevent him from being an artist of his own time, as shown by the portraits of some of the protagonists of the New York art scene in the 1970s and 1980s.
William Burroughs, Truman Capote, Bruce Chatwin and Joseph Kosuth were just some of the artists who passed before Mapplethorpe's lens.
In his career he succeeded in using transgression like no one else, associating it with classicism, pornography and purity of form.
Now celebrated as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, he died in New York in 1989 from complications due to HIV.
Noteworthy among his many exhibitions was "Perfection in Form" held in Florence in 2009, where his works were juxtaposed with masterpieces by Michelangelo and exhibited in the most appropriate setting, the Galleria dell’Accademia.
The exhibition's curators, Franca Falletti and Jonathan Nelson, bring out the affinities between the photographer and the Renaissance masters, particularly Michelangelo: the quest for balance, fairness and clarity inherent in the "Form" that tends to perfection through the geometric rigor of volumes defined by line and sculpted by light.
Moreover the photographer himself acknowledged his fascination with the art of Michelangelo, going so far as to declare:
"If I were born one or two hundred years ago, I could have made a good sculptor, but photography is a faster way to see things, to make sculptures."
PAG 99
"I seek for perfection in form… one subject rather than another makes no difference...I try to capture what appears "sculptural" to me"
PAG 101
"The first Polaroids I did have the same feeling as the pictures I do now. Right from the start, even before I knew a lot about photography, I had the same eyes"
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