Robert Mapplethorpe was one of the great masters of art photography. He produced highly stylised black and white portraits, nudes and still lifes. The exhibition, organized by the Reunion des Musées Nationaux-Grand Palais, with the cooperation of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation in New York and in association with the Musée Rodin, presents over 250 works making it one of the largest retrospective shows for this artist ever held in a museum. It covers Mapplethorpe’s entire career as a photographer, from the Polaroids of the early 1970s to the portraits from the late 1980s, touching on his sculptural nudes and still lifes, and sadomasochism. The focus on his two muses Patti Smith and Lisa Lyon explores the theme of women and femininity and reveals a less known aspect of the photographer’s work. The challenge of this exhibition is to show that Mapplethorpe is a great classical artist, who addressed issues in art using photography as he might have used sculpture. It also puts Mapplethorpe’s art into the context of the New York art scene in the 1970-1980s. 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.
http://www.grandpalais.fr/fr/evenement/robert-mapplethorpe
All Mapplethorpe Works © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission
All Mapplethorpe Works © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission
All Mapplethorpe Works © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission
Mapplethorpe positioned himself from the outset as an Artist, with a capital A. Unlike Helmut Newton, who as a teenager already wanted to be a fashion photographer, and imposed his vision of the world and photography, making it an art in its own right, Robert Mapplethorpe is a sculptor at heart, a plastic artist driven by the question of the body and its sexuality and obsessed by the search for perfect form. Like Man Ray, Mapplethorpe wanted to be “a creator of images” rather than a photographer, “a poet” rather than a documentarist. In the catalogue for the Milan exhibition which compared the two artists, Bruno Cora recalls the parallels in their lives and works: “Before becoming masterly photographers, Man Ray and Mapplethorpe had both been painters and sculptors, creators of objects; they both lived in Brooklyn in New York; they both made portraits of the intellectuals of their time; and they were both incisive explorers of the nude form, its sculptural qualities and the energy emanating from it.”
All Mapplethorpe Works © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission
All Mapplethorpe Works © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission
All Mapplethorpe Works © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission
