Robert Mapplethorpe's work

Robert Mapplethorpe

Robert Mapplethorpe was born in 1946, the third of six children. He remembered a very secure childhood on Long Island, which he summed up by saying, “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.” He received a B.F.A. from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he produced artwork in a variety of media. He had not taken any of his own photographs yet, but he was making art that incorporated many photographic images appropriated from other sources, including pages torn from magazines and books. This early interest reflected the importance of the photographic image in the culture and art of our time, including the work of such notable artists as Andy Warhol, whom Mapplethorpe greatly admired.

During the early 1980s, Mapplethorpe's photographs began a shift toward a phase of refinement of subject and an emphasis on classical formal beauty. During this period he concentrated on statuesque male and female nudes, delicate flower still lives, and formal portraits of artists and celebrities. He continued to challenge the definition of photography by introducing new techniques and formats to his oeuvre: color Polaroids, photogravure, platinum prints on paper and linen, Cibachomes and dye transfer color prints, as well as his earlier black-and-white gelatin silver prints. (Janet Kardon, p.9)Work Significance

Characteristics of Mapplethorpe's Work

Eros rules the World, and Robert Mapplethorpe celebrates eros. But rather than locating eros in a single, unambiguous sex, whether male or female, his photographs honor it for the multiplicity of its expressions, for its variety, for the confusions of identity it creates. For Mapplethorpe there is no passion that eros excludes, no boundaries it knows. His is a satisfied, inclusive eros, always reaching out for new life. It is inexhaustible. And it is totally without guilt over the desire to love and to be loved, without limit.

Mapplethorpe's work has emotional tenderness as well as sex. Desire wanders freely here, without repression or inhabitation. The photographs communicate the greatest possible investment in people and things. A vertiginous journey through the senses (of version, of sexual sensation), they have an erotic exuberance that ignores the distinctions made elsewhere between love and perversion, active and passive, dominant and dominated, good and evil. Mapplethorpe moves in he spaces that make people different, attracting them to each other, and producing the extraordinary personal and sensual surprises that constitute the erotic(Douglas 278-291).

As photographs, and classically structured photographs at that, Mapplethorpe's images condense the vitality and potency of their subjects to an extreme degree. Frozen-- but frozen in fullness, the dignity-- his subjects no longer clash and plunge in the torrent of the senses. There is always dialectic in these images between provocation and esthetic harmony. Consciously and unconsciously, Mapplethorpe tries to bridge the gap between opposites--order and disorder, dissent and assent, anarchy and the ideal. Similarly, he works for a vision of the human today as somewhere between woman and man, invoking an ...