Erotica and botany collide
As both the unlikely darling of New York’s avant-garde art galleries and a pivotal figure in the city’s burgeoning gay scene, artist and photographer’s career was nothing if not duplicitous. On the one hand, he was heavily preoccupied with classicism: his rippling, muscular, anatomical nude studies recall Michelangelo’swhile his sculptural images of hands have often been juxtaposed with casts made by French sculptor Rodin no less than a century earlier.
Mapplethorpe’s floral still lifes, a series of up-close photographs of the beautiful, hairy blooms in all of their fragility and vivid power, are perhaps the most intense distillation of the artist’s doubleness. The photographs draw on a rich and storied history of artists depicting flora – from the Dutch masters, whose gloomy reimaginings placed wilting blooms next to preying insects and glazed shells, to the black and white studies Helmut Newton made in the late 1960s.
“Whether it’s a cock or a flower, I’m looking at it in the same way… in my own way, with my own eyes” – Robert Mapplethorpe The sensuality of these works might have been caused, on a subconscious level, by the close cerebral quarters they shared with his more explicit pieces. “I like to look at pictures, all kinds, and all those things you absorb come out subconsciously one way or another,” Mapplethorpe once reflected. “You’ll be taking photographs and suddenly know that you have resources from having looked at a lot of them before. There is no way you can avoid this.
It’s this manifold and complex duplicity which forms the foundation for a new retrospective of Mapplethorpe’s extensive career at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, entitled. The exhibition, which has been no fewer than six years in the making, explores Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre through a collection which comprises drawings, collages, sculptures, Polaroids, photographic works and two rarely seen moving image works.
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