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Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) was born in New York. He earned a B.F.A.
from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he produced artwork in a
variety of media, mainly collage. The shift to photography as
Mapplethorpe's sole means of expression happened gradually during the
mid-seventies. He took his first photographs of his close friend, the
singer-artist-poet Patti Smith, using a Polaroid camera, and later
became known for his portraits of composers, architects, socialites,
stars of pornographic films, members of the S&M underground, and an
array of other unique people, many of whom were personal friends.
Mapplethorpe had his first solo exhibition in New York in 1976. During
the early 1980's, his photographs shifted to emphasize classical formal
beauty, concentrating on statuesque male and female nudes, delicate
flowers, still life, and formal portraits. In 1988, four major
exhibitions of his work were organized by the Stedelijk Museum in
Amsterdam, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, The Institute
of Contemporary Art at University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and
the National Portrait Gallery in London. These exhibitions, and the
controversial works they presented, sparked a larger international and
ongoing debate about public funding for the arts, censorship and other
First Amendment concerns, as well as the definition of that which is
considered art.
Mapplethorpe died from AIDS on March 9, 1989, in Boston, at age 42.
Since that time, his work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions
in galleries and museums throughout the world, including major traveling
retrospectives. Robert Mapplethorpe's work is widely collected, and he
is considered by many art scholars to be among the most important
American photographers of the latter half of the twentieth century.
For more information, please visit www.mapplethorpe.org.
