Robert Mapplethorpe: Photography & a new gay sensibility.

[gorgik9]

First a few words on what inspired me to write this thread centered on artist/photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989): what started it all was that my GH-friend Shelter wrote me a PM telling me that he had just watched Ondi Timoner's recent biopic about Mapplethorpe and - please, please - couldn't I start a long Mapplethorpe-thread on GH? Please? (I'll get back to the 2018 biopic later in this thread.)

So the second thing was that I gave him a rather grumpy answer - please, excuse me Shelter - and told him that I had two Mapplethorpe-threads on GH already and maybe he should look into them before demanding more from me, huh? Well, I revisited my own threads and soon realized that one of them was practically defunct: it was a thread based on a large number of pictures by George Dureau and Robert Mapplethorpe, but since the pichost I had been using was out of business since a few months back my richly illustrated thread had shrunk into a few lines of text...

I realized I had to stop being lazy and do something about it - and why not give my friend what he wanted?

* * * * * * * * * * *

The basic structure I want to give this thread is to make a portrait of a group of people with Robert Mapplethorpe at its center.

It's about people who radically changed the position of photography in the Western artworld in the 1970s-80s, putting at the same time a new gay sensibility at the center of these changes. Besides Mapplethorpe we will meet Patti Smith, George Dureau, John McKendrick, Sam Wagstaff, Peter Berlin, Marcus Leatherdale, Peter Hujar, Arthur Tress, Duane Michals and possibly a few more.

I also want to state that I've found the most important sources of information for this thread in the books and video talks by writer and photo critic Philip Gefter.

My estimate is that I'll make 2-3 posts weekly - but I can't guarantee that this will be the frequency.

A personal beginning: How I met the work of Robert Mapplethorpe.

It must have been late 1988 or early 1989. I've attended a lecture at the University of Gothenburg and was going to take the train back to Karlstad, but since I had an hour to spend before departure from the railway station I went into one of the bookshops.

There was a big table on the bookshop floor with piles of two Mapplethorpe books and I still remember which titles:

The first was the catalogue for the Mapplethorpe-exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art 1988, written by Richard Marshall, Richard Howard and Ingrid Sischy. The second was Mapplethorpe's Black Book, published in 1986 and with an essay by Ntozake Shange. I bought the first book, but my university student economy didn't accept buying also the second - something I've regretted ever since...

Back in Karlstad I sat at the table in my kitchen reading my new book and looking at all the pictures. I can't express the emotional state emerging in my body and mind with other words than that I was transfixed - and maybe even a bit scared: "-Am I really allowed to look at all this gorgeous stuff?"

I remember very well that my thoughts and feelings moved in this direction, but I've got difficulties fully understanding why. Maybe that's what being overwhelmed is all about?

Anyway! Mapplethorpe became and have remained a central part of my personal canon; he's up there, with Ludwig Wittgenstein, Samuel R. Delany and Guy Davenport. But Robert has always been the sexiest of my canonical bitches!!!

 

[Shelter]

Oh Gorgik you are really cruel - a great start of this story I've waited for. And it seems to me like a TV-series where the episode ends with a so called "cliffhanger". But you have got me and I'll wait for the next "episode".

And a very special "thank you" for all your time and work - but as I've told you: you are the one and only who can tell this story to all which are interested in here on GH.

Many, many thanks!!!

 

[gorgik9]

"In the beginning" was photography as a strictly utilitarian medium.

If you went to New York in 1970 and wanted to buy vintage prints of pioneers of photography like William Henry Fox Talbot, Gustave Le Gray, Julia Margaret Cameron, Alfred Stieglitz, Alvin Langdon Coburn or Imogene Cunningham - where did you go and how much would you expect to pay for what you found?

Well, the best thing to do would probably be to visit a number of second-hand bookshops where you could expect to see big boxes of old prints. With some luck you could pay as little as $5-10-25, sometimes $50, 75 or 100, but hardly ever as much as $200. It's as if you could expect to buy a painting by Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, Edward Hopper or Jackson Pollock for the price of canvas and paint + $50 for the painters work.

You'd certainly say: -That's ridiculous!!! Only a total idiot could have such expectations - but how come you COULD expect to buy a vintage print by Cameron or Stieglitz for hardly ever more than $100 in 1970? Basically because photography wasn't categorized among the Fine Arts - that's why!

Still in the late years of the 1960s neither Robert Mapplethorpe - who was a student at the Pratt Institute School of Arts, but dropped out before finishing his degree - nor his future lover, mentor and financial benefactor Sam Wagstaff (1921-1987) were of the opinion that photography should be considered among the fine arts. But in the early-to-mid 1970s things would start changing at fast pace!

Mapplethorpe met the curator for prints and drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, John McKendry (d. 1975) in 1971 and he gave Robert access to the photography collections in the vaults of the museum, which resulted in him frequently looking at masterpieces of photography from the 19th century, which in its turn started changing his thoughts on photography as a possible fine art.

Another important thing was that McKendry gave him his first own Polaroid-camera and arranged for him to get a film grant from Polaroid, which meant that Robert could go fetch as many cartridges of Polaroid film he liked. His neighbour in the Hotel Chelsea Sandy Daley had lent him her Polaroid, but it was McKendry who made sure he got his own.



In 1972 Robert met Sam Wagstaff, fell in love and soon started talking about the same theme he already had been mentioning to McKendry: changing the standing of photography among the fine arts.

The photo above is Edward Steichen's Flatiron Building from 1904 which was one of the pictures in the exhibition "The Painterly Photograph 1890-1914" opening in January 1973 at the Metropolitan Museum. Robert took Sam to the exhibition and it is said that it was precisely when looking at this photo by Steichen that Sam started revoking his former opinions on art and photography.

Things started happening very fast - Wagstaff was a doer and a changer! He started to become a photo collector, buying old prints like a madman in the second-hand bookstores of New York and the following year - 1974 - he did something no one had thought even remotely possible just a few years earlier: he bought the so-called "Herschel-album" by Julia Margaret Cameron at Sotheby's, London, for a whopping $130.000.

The photo below shows the Sotheby's auctioneer to the left and another aid holding the album to the right.



You could say: "-The rest is history!" - and I'll have my try at telling it. I think it's fascinating that a relatively small group of men - almost all of them gay men - could radically change the position of photography among the fine arts and at the same time give public expression to a new gay sensibility with the aid of photography having recently become prestigious.

Robert Mapplethorpe and Sam Wagstaff were at the center, but I will also write about a number of other gay photographers working in this epoch, many of them directly or at least indirectly interacting with Sam and Robert.

I will also at least give a list of names of gay collectors and art dealers who followed Sam Wagstaff's lead in making photography an important part of the artworld. I don't know enough about them to write something worthwhile, but here's the list of names: Harry H. Lunn Jr, Daniel Wolf, Howard Gilman, Paul F. Walter, Richard Pare, Pierre Apraxine, John Waddell and Georg Rinhart.

The beginning of this thread has been much more text than pictures - I'll try to change the proportions in later posts. But enough for today!

 

[gorgik9]

Oh Gorgik you are really cruel - a great start of this story I've waited for. And it seems to me like a TV-series where the episode ends with a so called "cliffhanger". But you have got me and I'll wait for the next "episode".

And a very special "thank you" for all your time and work - but as I've told you: you are the one and only who can tell this story to all which are interested in here on GH.

Many, many thanks!!!

And thanks to you for all the inspiration - or should I rather say: the friendly kick in the butt :big hug:

 

[gorgik9]

Robert Mapplethorpe - "The Shy Pornographer.

It was said that when Sam Wagstaff phoned Robert for the first time in 1972, he started the conversation with the words: "-Am I speaking to the shy pornographer?"

Mapplethorpe was born in November 1946 as the son of Joan Dorothy Maxey and Harry Irving Mapplethorpe; he grew up with three brothers and two sisters in a very Catholic family in Floral Park, Queens, New York.

The family attended mass every Sunday and this had a lasting importance for Robert: Not that he deeply pondered Catholic doctrine and moral theology, but he definitely did inherit Catholic visual symbolism and a certain Catholic-Classicist aesthetic, something that seems quite obvious to me. It really didn't matter how much he fucked around with other men - his aesthetics was still Catholic.

Below is an amateur photo of young Robert:



Patricia Morrisroe writes in chapter 1 of her 1995 Mapplethorpe-biography that he had a short-term job in the summer of 1963 - just weeks before he would enroll at Pratt Institute Art School - as a messenger at National City Bank. His lunch hours were spent at Times Square and he spotted a gay pornographic magazine in a store on Forty-Second Street. The magazine was wrapped in cellophane and the models genitals were covered by slashes of black tape. He was under eighteen, so he couldn't buy the magazine, but he became obsessed with trying to see what was inside. He said much later to his friend Ingrid Sischy:

"[The magazines] were all sealed, which made then even sexier somehow, because you couldn't get to see them. A kid gets a certain kind of reaction, which of course once you've been exposed to everything you don't get. I got that feeling in my stomach, it's not a directly sexual one, it's something more potent than that. I thought if I could somehow bring that element into art, if I could somehow retain that feeling, I would be doing something that was uniquely my own."

So he enrolled at Pratt Institute Art School in 1963 to study drawing, painting and sculpture, and met Patti Smith (b. 1946) in 1967 when she had recently arrived in Manhattan and worked at a bookstore frequented by Robert - and thus they started an intense romantic relationship.

The year 1969 was eventful and brought along important changes: while Robert dropped out of Pratt Institute without the degree of Bachelor of Fine Arts, Patti took a several months long journey to Paris, France, with her sister Kimberley. After her return to NY on 21 July, she and Robert soon moved into the famous Hotel Chelsea on 222 West 23rd Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenue, where they would live for a number of years. Their stay at the Chelsea became sort of another university since they would meet and interact with so many writers, artists, musicians and other interesting people living in the hotel.

Patti was the breadwinner going to work every day, while Robert - well, what did he do? Maybe you could say that he tried to understand what kind of artist he should become? He made various kinds of collages, assemblages and other art objects, and while his Chelsea-neighbour Sandy Daley had lent him her Polaroid, he definitely hadn't claimed photography as his defining medium yet.

So he made collages from cut-outs of magazine images...







...or assemblages using nude Polaroid self-portraits...



...and other kinds of art objects:



As I mentioned above, the guy who made Robert have new thoughts about his relation to photography was John McKendry, the Metropolitan Museum curator whom he had met in 1971. The photo by Mapplethorpe below is literally a picture of a dying man: Robert took it in McKendry's room at St Clare's hospital in 1975 the day before John passed away from liver disease caused by exessive drinking and drug taking.




Polaroid exhibition 1973.

Mapplethorpe's first public exhibition was his 1973 show of his Polaroids in the Light Gallery, Manhattan. He had quite a few nude self-portraits in this show:










"Photography" as a dirty word.

I think it's necessary to get a broader background to understand what would soon start happening from the mid 1970s on.

It wasn't at all the case that visual art based on photography didn't exist before the 1970s - to the contrary, there were quite a few American and European artists that regularly made art based on various kinds of photography.

To name just a few we have Ed Ruscha...



...and Joseph Kosuth...



...but of course the most famous and influential of them all was Andy Warhol:



The work above is Warhol's Race Riot from 1964. He made 10 silk-screen canvases and gave two red canvases as a present for his good friend Sam Wagstaff, who later on bought a black/white and a blue canvas from Warhol's dealer Leo Castelli and made the grid above from these 4 canvases.

The point is, that while there were quite a lot of photography-based art in the 1960s, you couldn't mention that that was the case! You had to re-baptize the work of art and give it another name. So Warhol's work became "silk-screen on canvas" while Kosuth's work became "conceptual art". Lots and lots of so-called "Pop Art" actually was - photography based art.

But you couldn't say so.

Yeah, yeah, I agree - it's ridiculous. And in the 1970s it was really time for photography to ... hrmmm... come out of the Art Closet. We'll start our coming out-party in the next post - see you!

 

[Mardo]

I don't think you can compare something by Warhol, and e.g. the Mona Lisa.

Warhol produced lucrative gimmicks. The most notorious was the tins of beans and other foods bought from the local supermarket and then he just stacked them up in a gallery.

Warhol is part and parcel of post-structuralism/post-modernism. A movement to deconstruct and devalue and render impotent all the great works and artistry that has come before. If you say that a random stack of bean cans has the same value as the Mona Lisa, you render the Mona Lisa a literal nothingness. You piss on it.

Clever? I suppose. Beautiful? Absolutely not.

So not my cup of tea. But interesting nonetheless.

So, gorgik9, what in your opinion is Robert's greatest piece?

 

[gorgik9]

Mapplethorpe, Hasselblad and Leather Culture.

In 1973 Robert was already a year into the new relation with Sam Wagstaff (a lot more about Wagstaff in his own post in this thread) who also had just begun to build his large photo collection inspired by Robert's urging that it was due time that photography got the consideration as a fine art it deserved. Robert was the emotional engine behind these changes, not Sam, but of course it was Sam's wealth, erudition and vast net of connections in the artworld that made things actually happen, practically and economically. Robert inspired, Sam made sure things got done.

A couple of years ahead - in 1975 - Robert got a magnificent present from Sam: a Hasselblad-camera. That is a very, very expensive camera and a top quality camera. This gift made epoch in his work since it practically ended his use of Polaroid and stopped him making assemblages from Polaroid pictures.

Below we find three among Robert's most well-known pictures, made in 1975-1978 with his new Hasselblad. We have two self portraits (1975 and 1978 [self portrait with whip]) and the portrait of Mark Stevens ("Mr 10½", 1976).



There's an amusing fact that though Mapplethorpe was invited and represented in the big doenta 6 exhibition in Kassel, West Germany, in 1977 (and would be invited and represented again in doenta 7 in 1982) his international fame was still relatively marginal: French critic Roland Barthes (1915-1980) wrote a chapter in his book Le chambre claire: note sur la photographie (1980, eng: Camera Lucida: Reflections on photography, 1981) about the picture above, but Barthes wasn't sure that the man in the picture was the Robert Mapplethorpe who made it.





The 1978 self portrait with bullwhip also gives an expression of the fact that Robert in the late 70s got a much more direct and intense relation to gay leather and S/M culture. He made covers for leather magazine Drummer and he also had a relation with Jack Fritscher (b.1939) - the editor-in-chief of Drummer - during the period 1977-1980. Fritscher is a Catholic (like Robert) and had studied Latin, Greek, philosophy, theology and literature at the Pontifical Collegium Josephinum in Rome, and later at Loyola University, Chicago, and started teaching from 1965 at Loyola, Western Michigan University and Kalamazoo College.



Reading Fritscher's comments on Mapplethorpe's art and life is, in my opinion, very rewarding since he combines the knowledge and understanding of Robert as a person and a lover, with a deep knowledge of their common Catholic background.

What follows next are a few pictures from this intense leather & S/M-period!









URL=https://pimpandhost.com/image/116292959]

[/URL]

 

[gorgik9]

I don't think you can compare something by Warhol, and e.g. the Mona Lisa.

Warhol produced lucrative gimmicks. The most notorious was the tins of beans and other foods bought from the local supermarket and then he just stacked them up in a gallery.

Warhol is part and parcel of post-structuralism/post-modernism. A movement to deconstruct and devalue and render impotent all the great works and artistry that has come before. If you say that a random stack of bean cans has the same value as the Mona Lisa, you render the Mona Lisa a literal nothingness. You piss on it.

Clever? I suppose. Beautiful? Absolutely not.

So not my cup of tea. But interesting nonetheless.

So, gorgik9, what in your opinion is Robert's greatest piece?

Hello Mardo,

I guess I really don't understand your argument...

I didn't want to compare Andy Warhol or anybody else with anybody else - I just wanted to state a simple but in this context important fact about art exploring the photographic image in the 1960s - the simple fact that quite a number of American and European artists had begun making photography-based art, but the rhetoric of the times didn't really accept saying so.

So what was new in the 1970s wasn't photography-based art as such, but that people like Mapplethorpe and Wagstaff started stating the facts.

It is tempting to start a long thread about Warhol within my Mapplethorpe-thread, but I must definitely resist this temptation. I have no problems whatsoever if you don't like Warhol's art - but why the pretentious nonsens about post-structuralism/post-modernism, please that's utter nutter nonsens. In some sense Warhol was a pretty unusual kind of philosopher - a gay philosopher - using his own art to discuss and work through classical metaphysical problems of time, space and embodiment - but that must wait until another thread...

You also ask what I think is Mapplethorpe's "greatest piece" - well, just like Warhol he was so incredible productive, an extreme work-a-holic, which means there's so much to look at & I guess that I would say different things of different days - depending on the way my own mood swings.

But I think that on any day of the week I'd point to some of his very late pictures, some of the pictures he made when he was literally almost dead - these are pictures to make me cry every damn time I look at them, just like I always start crying when I listen to Jussi Björling's best recording of "Oh Holy Night" - every damn time when he takes the highest notes at the end.

 

[gorgik9]

There's no going back once you've gone black...

If the mid-to-late 1970s was Mapplethorpe's big period of gay leather and S/M culture, then the early-to-mid 1980s definitely was the time of black men - in front of his camera, for sure, but also as lovers and partners in his life.



The man in the famous/infamous polyester suite above is Milton Moore who was Robert's lover during a period in the early 80s and I'll write more about him in the next post in this thread, " 'Mapplethorpe' : The Biopic". Mapplethorpe had a lot of black models and one of the most frequent in front of his camera was Ken Moody - who never got his dick portrayed by Robert.



So we had Philip Prioleau...



...and Dennis Speight...



...and then Jack Walls, who became Robert's last boyfriend...



Going back to the early 1980s we find Ajitto...



The picture above is one of several versions of Ajitto, which in its turn is a photographic take on a neo-classicist painting from 1836 by French painter Hippolyte Flandrin, Jeune homme nu assis au bord de la mer.



So Mapplethorpe's artistic project included going back in history, back to the times before the Romantic conception of art had become totally dominant, back to the classicist conception of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Art according to the Romantic conception is about a male artist painting a neccessarily female model, preferably half nude, and beauty in art is thought to reside in the painting itself.

But according to the classicist conception, beauty in art is about depicting the beautiful in God's created nature, so the beauty in art is only secondary, beauty only in second hand.

In the classicist conception - following the Christian theology of creation (if you haven't read Genesis, chapters 1-2, it's about time you do so...) - natural beauty comes with a hierarchy, and the highest beauty there is in the world is: the nude man, since God created Adam before creating Eve. And beauty has absolutely nothing to do with shirts, coats, trousers and shoes. So it's definitely possible to justify an art that could be mistaken for gay porn with classical theology of creation. Or in other words: Mapplethorpe was a Catholic boy - and that's not a marginal fact.

* * * * * * * * * *

If you ask weather Mapplethorpe should be considered a true pioneer in the photography of the male nude in general and the black male nude in particular, the answer will depend on what you mean by the phrase "being the pioneer": If you mean the person who managed to get photographic male nudes to hang on the walls of respected New York galleries, then Mapplethorpe is your man.

But if you mean who was the first in modern times to regularly pose male nudes in front of the camera, then I guess the prize must go to that remarcable artist / photographer from New Orleans George Dureau (1930-2014) of whom we will read more about later in this thread.

 

[Mardo]

Some of the photo's are interesting. They remind a little of Cad1not movies.

Why is one a mere pornographer but the other is not?

Is there a convincing answer?

 

[gorgik9]

Some of the photo's are interesting. They remind a little of Cad1not movies.

Why is one a mere pornographer but the other is not?

Is there a convincing answer?

I guess it depends on who is to be convinced and what that person will mean by convincing.

But if I'm the one to be "the Devil's Advocate" I'd start in the late 18th and early 19th century and discuss the historical reasons for constructing the exclusionary category of pornography at all, and implementing it in Obscene Publications legislation from the 1850s. I think I've done this at least in parts already, and you'll probably / possibly find something useful somewhere in my old thread "The history of gay porn cinema" I posted together with haiducii a few years ago.

But there's a distinct connection between Mapplethorpe and Cadin0t in the sense that the second worked as a professional photographer and had his own photo studio in Paris, France, years before he started making gay porn movies in the early 1980s.

 

[Mardo]

I guess it depends on who is to be convinced and what that person will mean by convincing.

But if I'm the one to be "the Devil's Advocate" I'd start in the late 18th and early 19th century and discuss the historical reasons for constructing the exclusionary category of pornography at all, and implementing it in Obscene Publications legislation from the 1850s. I think I've done this at least in parts already, and you'll probably / possibly find something useful somewhere in my old thread "The history of gay porn cinema" I posted together with haiducii a few years ago.

But there's a distinct connection between Mapplethorpe and Cadin0t in the sense that the second worked as a professional photographer and had his own photo studio in Paris, France, years before he started making gay porn movies in the early 1980s.

Porn is intended to arouse the sex drive.

Art is intended to stimulates the intellect. The mind.

Cad1not does not stimulate my mind. Except maybe slightly.

Mapplethorpe's work, when it is not overwhelmingly pornographic, is similar to fashion photography perhaps. Conceptual, almost clinically so.

Is fashion art?

I don't think so.

It has it's own purpose and appeal.

But is is not the Mona Lisa.

I admire that which does not rely on the appeal of shock, and which does not have to be radical or outrageous.

There is nothing shocking, or even vaguely controversial or scandalous about the Mona Lisa. And yet it has captured the imagination of many millions. Now that is an achievement born out of pure artistry. Nothing else.

 

[gorgik9]

Porn is intended to arouse the sex drive.

Art is intended to stimulates the intellect. The mind.

Cad1not does not stimulate my mind. Except maybe slightly.

Mapplethorpe's work, when it is not overwhelmingly pornographic, is similar to fashion photography perhaps. Conceptual, almost clinically so.

Is fashion art?

I don't think so.

It has it's own purpose and appeal.

But is is not the Mona Lisa.

I admire that which does not rely on the appeal of shock, and which does not have to be radical or outrageous.

There is nothing shocking, or even vaguely controversial or scandalous about the Mona Lisa. And yet it has captured the imagination of many millions. Now that is an achievement born out of pure artistry. Nothing else.

I must confess I'm tempted to start a long thread on art & pornography within this thread - but I realize it's a temptation to be resisted harshly.

But I think we would have a lot of friendly disagreement...

 

[Dazbacca]

I must confess I'm tempted to start a long thread on art & pornography within this thread - but I realize it's a temptation to be resisted harshly.

But I think we would have a lot of friendly disagreement...

Why so harshly?

:?

 

[gorgik9]

'Mapplethorpe' - the 2018 biopic.



Matt Smith as Robert Mapplethorpe in 'Mapplethorpe' (2018)

I think that director Ondi Timoner's biopic "Mapplethorpe" (2018) is an OK movie, but not much more than that. It has some big assets among which Matt Smith's brilliant acting are among the most important; other assets are its beautiful cinematography and the fact that David Croland (played by Thomas Philip O'Neill) get a rich portrait. Croland was Robert's first gay lover but also - which is a lot more important for anyone remotely interested in Mapplethorpe's development as an artist - the channel through which he connected with John McKendry and Sam Wagstaff.

This brings me to its drawbacks and my first argument against it might seem contradictory: on the one hand there are just too many biographic facts reported, rapidly moving on to the next little snippet of fact as soon as the snippet before has been shown; but on the other hand there is too much of importance left out - How will I square this apparent contradiction?

"Mapplethorpe" is Biopic 101 - its a totally linear movie going from A (summer 1969) to B (his death) and packing as much as possible in between without giving the viewer much opportunity for psychological and intellectual reflection. The movie is told in such a way that it makes us believe, that Mapplethorpe met Patti Smith in the summer of 1969, just after he had dropped out of Pratt Institute - which is factually wrong. Every reliable source clearly states that Robert and Patti met in 1967, not in 1969 - so says Patti Smith herself in her autobiographical Just Kids, and so says Patricia Morrisroe in her biography of Mapplethorpe. End of this discussion.

I think that the possibility of a better movie depends on the courage of the screenwriter and director to decide what will be important in the movie, sticking to their own desicions and taking the artistic consequences - giving the viewers time to ponder what is going on.

I'll be so bold as to suggest two options for a better Mapplethorpe movie: the first could be a movie about Robert's life with Patti, and this could be a movie spanning the years 1967-1972; the second - my favourite - would be a movie about Mapplethorpe deciding to become a photographer and starting an artworld revolution, let's say a movie spanning the years 1971 (meeting John McKendry) to 1977 (his first big exhibition in two galleries at the same time).

In the 2018 biopic McKendry isn't even mentioned by name and when we get to meet Sam Wagstaff (36 min 5 sec into the movie) we don't really get an understanding of in what way they became so important for each others. Their artworld revolution was very much a co-operative project - which the movie doesn't tell us. When they go to the Metropolitan Museum together (42 min into the movie) we get the utterly erroneus impression that it was Wagstaff taking Robert to see old Victorian photos - but the real story was the inverse. It was Robert pushing Sam towards photography, not Sam pushing Robert.

And about actor Matt Smith and Mapplethorpe: while Smith is a good actor he's also far from the kind of luminous cutiepie Robert was in his early twenties.




Portrait of Robert Mapplethorpe by Gerard Malanga.


Mapplethorpe - the racist?

There are a number of details I could comment on, but I want to concentrate on the way the movie treats Mapplethorpe's relation to his black models and lovers and in particular one of his most important black relations, Milton Moore, the man in the famous/infamous polyester suit.

We see Milton in two scenes: the first is when Robert met him for the first time (61 min 30 sec - 64 min); the second is what the movie presents as their last time together (72 min 20 sec - 74 min 30 sec).

In the first scene Robert invites Milton to follow him up to his studio to take pictures after having just met him at night in the street. The actor playing Milton (McKinley Belcher III) is definitely not a Milton-lookalike, which will be of importance (Belcher actually looks a lot more like Ken Moody), and he's presented as a pretty akward and timid character.

This first scene is where the famous "Man in polyester suit" is made: Mapplethorpe asks Milton to take off his trousers so he can see his cock and Milton says that he can't do that out of respect of his family. Robert's response is: "What is I promise to never show your cock and your face in the same frame?" He then goes to fetch a big hood, puts it over Milton's head and "Man in polyester suit" is made.

In the second scene we see Milton sitting on the bed in Robert's bedroom obviously angry and sad having torn up books and other things. Robert asks, very worried, when he enters the room: "-What's the matter? I love you!" Milton's sad and angry answer is that he - Robert - doesn't love anyone but himself and makes people do shitty things. He storms out of the room after demanding money from Mapplethorpe and smashing a number of framed and glassed "Man in polyester suit".

Well, these two scenes can hardly give anyone any other impression than that Robert Mapplethorpe was a egomaniac jerk and probably a horrible racist. I'm going to complicate this picture a lot, but I'm not going to pretend that everything that he did and said to Milton Moore or his other black models and lovers was just hunky dory - obviously not, but the situation was a lot more complicated in ways the movie doesn't tell us about, and there were things you just couldn't blame Robert for because it was totally out of his control.

So who was Milton Moore when Robert first met him? He had served in the US Navy and had recently quit. Below we have Robert's portrait of Milton in uniform:



Then a couple of Milton's spectacularly muscular physique:





But of course Robert ALSO took picture's of Milton's remarcable cock:



In Timoner's movie it's made to look like it was Robert's own idea to never show Milton's cock in the same frame as his face, but in all other sources of information I'm aquainted with it was the other way around: Milton made on his own initiative Robert promise he would never put cock and face in the same frame and he kept his promise until the day he died. Is it a bad thing to keep the promises you've made? You be the judge...

I want to end this chapter with a discussion of two critics and commentators with a sense of humour in Mapplethorpe's work, Philip Gefter and Jack Fritscher.

In a public talk at the School of Visual Arts, New York, Gefter argued that the humour and wit in Mapplethorpe's art is too seldom talked about but would deserve to be the topic of someone's doctoral dissertation. He refers to "Mr 10½" and "Man in polyester suit" as two quite obvious examples.

Mapplethorpe's former lover and fellow Catholic Jack Fritscher highlighted a couple of important points in his 2016 article " 'He was a sexual outlaw' : My love affair with Robert Mapplethorpe", published in The Guardian.

Fritscher said that Robert was very well aware that racism was a mortal sin to the Catholic faith and that he "sweated with white guilt trying to make his quest for black beauty keep him" from this grave sin. Fritscher points to the fact that he didn't just dedicate the last decade of his life to portraying naked men with big dicks, but also doented important black artists like dancers Bill T Jones and Gregory Hines.


Robert Mapplethorpe: Bill T Jones


Robert Mapplethorpe: Gregory Hines

The second point highlighted by Fritscher was that Robert "was an existential comedian" selling pictures of the most frightening thing there was in the opinion of his rich white upper-middleclass patrons: big black penises.

From which we get to understand that humour can sometimes be bitchy, black and bloody!

* * * * * *

I want to end this chapter on a sad note: While Milton Moore had a very powerfull muscular body, he also had a fragile mind with serious psychiatric issues.

Mapplethorpe's most serious moral error in relation to Milton was in my opinion definitely not "Man in polyester suit". It was that he couldn't and didn't want to fully understand that his lover dearly needed professional psychiatric help - THAT is very difficult to forgive Mapplethorpe for.

If you want to cry and weep, go read the chapters on Milton in Patricia Morrisroe's biography of Mapplethorpe.

 

[gorgik9]

Why so harshly?

:?

Have you got ANY idea of the work and time I'm putting into my Mapplethorpe-thread? No, probably not. I'll have to resist all temptations to start sliding away into everything else. The "Art & Porn" thread is a possibility but NOT inside my Mapplethorpe-thread...

 

[Dazbacca]

Have you got ANY idea of the work and time I'm putting into my Mapplethorpe-thread? No, probably not. I'll have to resist all temptations to start sliding away into everything else. The "Art & Porn" thread is a possibility but NOT inside my Mapplethorpe-thread...

Why start a thread if you don't want responses or engagement?

A very puzzling attitude.

Surely the work of your hero Mapplethorpe has to stand up to challenges and tough questions, or it is only a paper tiger. People who write passionately are usually eager to defend. But maybe once you get a certain amount of material posted you can then return later to address question marks. That seems to me the most sensible and organised approach.

Thank you for your efforts.

 

[gorgik9]

Why start a thread if you don't want responses or engagement?

A very puzzling attitude.

Surely the work of your hero Mapplethorpe has to stand up to challenges and tough questions, or it is only a paper tiger. People who write passionately are usually eager to defend. But maybe once you get a certain amount of material posted you can then return later to address question marks. That seems to me the most sensible and organised approach.

Thank you for your efforts.

Well "your [my] hero Mapplethorpe" doesn't have to stand up to any challenges - since he's been dead since 1989.

Other members on this forum have asked me to post this thread and since I've got a lot of work left to do I'm just trying to remind myself not to get too off-topic in my own thread.

I certainly don't find this "attitude" particularly "puzzling" - it's the attitude needed if the work is to be done in reasonable time.

 

[Dazbacca]

I said, and I quote: 'the work of your hero Mapplethorpe has to stand up to challenges'.

Which it does.

The artist may be dead, but his work still exists. People don't stop challenging work because a writer/artist/painter/sculpter is deceased.

Those who admire the work can answer the challenge, if they are able to, and if they are sufficiently motivated. You seem motivated enough anyway. True?

 

[gorgik9]

I said, and I quote: 'the work of your hero Mapplethorpe has to stand up to challenges'.

Which it does.

The artist may be dead, but his work still exists. People don't stop challenging work because a writer/artist/painter/sculpter is deceased.

Those who admire the work can answer the challenge, if they are able to, and if they are sufficiently motivated. You seem motivated enough anyway. True?

Of course, your right. If I came out un-necessarily grumpy last night it was mainly because I was very tired and had just posted a long, dense chapter. I needed to go to bed ASAP.