Photo: Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946–89). Untitled (London), 1973, Polaroid print. Gift of The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation to the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
An archive is a repository of soul. Each of the pieces included is a drop in the bucket of life, a drop that comes and goes, forever lost to the past unless someone decided it was worthy of preservation. What survives the test of time becomes out shared history.
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In 1988, just a year before his death from AIDS, Robert Mapplethorpe established the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation to preserve his artistic legacy. It is the Foundation that maintains the archive and in doing so, it maintains the way in which the public receives the work. In 2011, the Foundation signed a comprehensive gift agreement with The J. Paul Getty Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art providing a definitive collection of Mapplethorpe’s finished artworks and the tools necessary to manage, research, and exhibit together. Together they’ve kicked things off in high style with concurrent exhibition, now on view through July 31, 2016.
Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946–89). Polaroid test short of the interior of Mapplethorpe’s West Twenty-third Street loft, taken for House & Garden, June 1988. Gift of The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.
The exhibitions have also spawned two tremendous volumes of work: Robert Mapplethorpe: The Photographs and Robert Mapplethorpe: The Archive (Getty Research Institute). Robert Mapplethorpe: The Archive surveys Mapplethorpe in a series of personal items that add a layer to our understanding of both the man and the artist. Organized as a scrapbook of memories from a life in art, the book offers a context in which the art was made, creating a continuum between experience and expression on every page.
The book traces Mapplethorpe’s history beginning in the early days, when he and Patti Smith took the city by storm with a new kind of chic and continues as his career ascends through partnership with his long-time companion, artistic mentor and benefactor, Sam Wagstaff, art dealer Holly Solomon, and artist and curator Sandy Daley, among others.
Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946–89). Banana & Keys, 1974. From Interview 5, no. 11 (November 1975): n. p. Gift of The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.
Robert Mapplethorpe: The Archive brilliantly articulates Mapplethorpe’s well-crafted trajectory to stratospheric heights, revealing the ways in which he synthesized a wide array of influences and distilled an understanding that was crisp, cool, and concise while simultaneous hotly provocative. This balance of duality is truly an art, one that Mapplethorpe executed with a consistency that was so prolific as to be compulsive. This is the beauty of context and the references it provides.
Among the most gracious spreads appears just past the midpoint of the book. A December 1988 cover of ARTnews featuring a flower photograph by Mapplethorpe is juxtaposed with a postcard the artist received from Wagstaff in 1973. The postcard is a black and white image of Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruit (c. 1597). Taken together, everything makes perfect sense. There is a continuum that exists in Western art, one that informs so much of the lexicon of visual discourse. Ways of seeing become integral to personalities that are compelled to gaze endlessly upon the world. Mapplethorpe brilliantly embodies the artistic spirit, just as Caravaggio did: the adored enfant terrible that weaves a spell of enchantment with a series of images that as so sensuous and evocative that they rival Nature herself.
Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946–89). Self-Portrait, ca. 1973, color Polaroid print. Gift of The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation to the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Miss Rosen is a New York-based writer, curator, and brand strategist. There is nothing she adores so much as photography and books. A small part of her wishes she had a proper library, like in the game of Clue. Then she could blaze and write soliloquies to her in and out of print loves.
