Biography

1946

Joan and Harry Mapplethorpe’s third child, Robert, was born on November 4th in Floral Park, Queens (NYC). Theirs was a numerous family, and the six children – two sons and four daughters – received a strict Catholic upbringing, in line with the social and moral conformism of post-war America amplified by the spread of suburban culture. His parents advocated a return to traditional values and instilled in their children a powerful sense of guilt related to the subject of sexuality, themes which Mapplethorpe later explored and subverted in his works. His father, an electrical engineer by trade, was a photography enthusiast and turned a portion of the family home into a dark room. However, Robert displayed no interest in this medium.

1960

Robert attended the Martin Van Buren High School, in Queens, where he played the saxophone and discovered a creative approach to the human figure. The 1960s were an intense time in the United States, with the Vietnam war, student protests, and the emergence of the very first movements for queer rights, aiming to transform society by eradicating the patriarchy. This was an era of great cultural and creative ferment, and in 1963 Andy Warhol, the father of Pop Art, opened his studio, the famous Factory, which became a cult venue for counterculture activity for New Yorkers that impacted young Mapplethorpe greatly.

1963

Robert graduated high school and enrolled in the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn where he majored in advertising and design.

1965

Advertising wasn’t his true vocation. He changed his major to graphic arts allowing him to study drawing, painting, and sculpture.

1966

His first artistic experiments were predominantly psychedelic, displaying the profound influence and fascination exerted upon him by the British painter William Blake’s spiritual works and the culture of LSD among his peers on campus.

1967

In New York, Robert met one of the most important women of his life, Patti Smith. Patti was born to a humble family in Chicago on December 30th, 1946, and moved to New York City in the 1960s. She had been interested in poetry and art from a very early age, and after her short time at Glassboro State College in New Jersey studying art, she devoted herself entirely to writing and music. Her encounter with Robert Mapplethorpe marked the beginning of a journey that led her to become one of the icons of punk and the 1970s counterculture. They soon decided to share an apartment near Pratt Institute: it was the beginning of a profound, formative relationship. For a living, Robert was a visual merchandiser at the FAO Schwarz toy store, while Patti worked in bookstores and pursued her creative aspirations in the bohemian art world, which she expressed publicly through poetry, visual art, and performances.

1968

On June 3rd, the radical feminist Valerie Solanas attempted to murder Andy Warhol after he supposedly rejected her work. She shot him, wounding him critically. The accident was featured on the front pages of newspapers for days and had a powerful impact on the city’s social and cultural life of which Warhol and the Factory were crucial nodes. At the time, Robert Mapplethorpe’s artistic pursuits were mainly focused on creating collages. His Catholic upbringing emerged powerfully and quite explicitly, with numerous references appearing in his works. However, his stylistic references gradually changed, centering on the avant-garde experiments made by Joseph Cornell or the ever-changing Marcel Duchamp. Thus, Mapplethorpe embellished his compositions with boxes and altars that gave his homoerotic fascination an iconographic significance.

1969

Mapplethorpe abandoned his studies at Pratt Institute once and for all and moved to the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan with Patti Smith with whom he was in love. Together they frequented the most popular meeting places for the art community in New York City, among which Max’s Kansas City nightclub and restaurant near Union Square, where many of the members of Warhol’s Factory gathered and Robert met Gerard Malanga, Viva, Jackie Curtis, Danny Fields, and Candy Darling; or the Chelsea Hotel, the epicenter of counterculture, patronized by Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, and Arthur C. Clarke, among others. The communities that came together in these venues stimulated Mapplethorpe’s curiosity for the avant-garde movements and the freedom of creative expression. While socializing, he also collected new stimuli and continued to work on his collages, beginning to place pornographic fragments taken from erotic magazines alongside the sacred images. That same year, Andy Warhol founded the magazine “Interview” together with the journalist John Wilcock and the poet and photographer Gerard Malanga. It was a celebration of pop culture and the avant-garde, and published informal interviews with celebrities from the worlds of film, music, art, and fashion, often conducted by Warhol himself. The magazine presented a unique style that combined art photography and innovative graphics and became an important platform to promote the Factory and amplify the cult of emerging celebrities. “Interview” was considered a crucial voice throughout the 1970s and 80s, not merely capturing the spirit of its times, but rather helping to define it, bridging the gap between elitist art and popular culture. Though in those years a great artistic and political ferment animated New York, profound social inequality was also widespread. On the night between June 27th and 28th, the umpteenth violent police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar and a focal point for the city’s queer community, triggered the outbreak of the “Stonewall riots”: for the first time, the patrons of the bar decided to rebel against their oppressors, inaugurating the first of several nights of protests and fighting. It was the symbolic beginning of the movement for the liberation of the queer community in the United States.

1970

Robert met the visual artist Sandy Daley, who was also living at the Chelsea Hotel. They became friends and produced a film in which Daley filmed Mapplethorpe while he got his nipple pierced. The narrator of the action was, of course, Patti Smith. It was Daley who gave Robert his first Polaroid camera so that he could take his own photos. The space offered by their room/studio at the Chelsea Hotel was no longer sufficient, so Robert and Patti moved to a converted loft in the same neighborhood.

1971

The short film Robert Having His Nipple Pierced was shown at the MoMA in New York. In his frequentation of the museum environment, Mapplethorpe met John McKendry who was in charge of the MET’s department of prints and photographs, and introduced him to its photo archive. Robert was taken with the idea of using photography as a means of artistic expression and the many opportunities offered by printing processes. The history of the medium fascinated him and allowed him to observe with new wonder the works of Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand. On his birthday he held one of his very first exhibitions at the Chelsea Hotel, showing his collages and his artistic constructions.

1972

Robert met Sam Wagstaff, a wealthy art collector and enthusiast with whom he established a long-lasting sentimental and professional relationship. To encourage his prot.g.’s obsession with photography and prove his devotion, Wagstaff purchased a new studio for Robert at 24 Bond Street while at the same time beginning to invest in photography as a form of art. Bond Street was at the heart of the cultural and artistic activity of the NoHo neighborhood (North of Houston Street). The area was inhabited by an eclectic community of artists, musicians, and writers drawn by a favorable real estate market and the roomy lofts resulting from the conversion of industrial buildings. Bond Street reflected the blend of creative energy and urban decay that was distinctive of New York City, with dilapidated historic buildings standing alongside art studios and underground clubs. The street was part of a vibrant microcosm where the burgeoning punk culture, conceptual art, and the avant-garde movements came together. The presence of nearby art galleries, small caf.s, and a spirit of experimentation rendered Bond Street the perfect spot for people using art as a statement of their refusal of and challenge to convention and tradition.

1973

Mapplethorpe installed Polaroids, his first solo gallery exhibition, at the Light Gallery in New York. That same year, he took the photograph that was to become the cover picture for Witt, Patti Smith’s third book of poetry.

1974

The American Psychiatric Association, the most authoritative professional psychiatric organization in the world, removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders, a first step towards destigmatization.

1975

Robert’s portrait of Patti Smith was used as the cover art for Horses, Patti’s first album produced by a record label. That same year, Holly Solomon, the influential New York City art dealer and collector known for supporting emerging art movements, opened her gallery in SoHo (South of Houston Street). The Holly Solomon Gallery soon became a hub for artists who defied convention.

1976

Sam Wagstaff gave Mapplethorpe a Hasselblad 500C. Equipped with his new camera, Robert began frequenting the Mineshaft, a legendary underground gay club in the heart of New York’s Meatpacking District, where he was able to transform his extensive exploration of the BDSM subculture into images, becoming an eyewitness to practices mostly unknown to the general public. The Mineshaft was more than just a club: it was a place for sexual and social exploration where transgression and freedom of expression reigned supreme. The club had no sign out front and was structured on multiple levels, including areas dedicated to different themes, such as cages, slings, and dark rooms, and a main bar attended by artists, intellectuals, and members of the queer counterculture. Its crude, visceral atmosphere made it attractive to people like Mapplethorpe, who found it a fertile environment for the exploration of boundaries and power applied to sexuality. Mineshaft also embodied the rebellious, libertarian spirit of New York City in the pre-AIDS era, before the health crisis transformed the city’s culture and society forever.

1977

Robert was commissioned to shoot a cover image for “Drummer,” a magazine for the leather and BDSM communities. Its founder and editor Jack Fritscher, and Mapplethorpe were briefly lovers. In conjunction with this declaration of iconographic intent, Mapplethorpe inaugurated new solo exhibitions in New York City: Erotic Pictures at The Kitchen, Portraits and Flowers at the Holly Solomon Gallery. The latter became a crucial platform to introduce a cultured and influential audience to his work, helping to consolidate his reputation among the art-world .lite and establishing him as one of the innovative voices of contemporary photography. That same year he was invited to participate in Documenta 6 in Kassel, Germany. It was another significant moment in his career that placed him in a global context and bolstered his image internationally by acknowledging his contribution to photography as an art form and placing him among the main players in the contemporary scene.

1978

X Portfolio and Y Portfolio, his first anthologies of sadomasochistic exploration and floral anatomies, were both published in limited editions. When he held the solo exhibition Mapplethorpe Photographs at the Simon Lowinsky Gallery in San Francisco, the most explicit images were removed from the show: it was the first time he faced censorship. His reaction was to take the discarded images and include them in another solo exhibition held in San Francisco at the Langton Street Gallery, provocatively entitled Censored.

1979

Mapplethorpe hired Tom Baril, a skilled silver gelatin printer, to work in his studio and process and print his black and white works. Baril kept the job until Mapplethorpe’s death.

1980

Robert met Lisa Lyon, the first female world-champion bodybuilder. Her body bewitched him: the perfect union of feminine shapeliness of forms and the magnificence of a bodybuilder’s physique. She became his new muse. Lithe and muscular, Lisa challenged convention and the idea of traditional beauty, becoming an icon for many women who were attempting to break free of the physical stereotypes imposed by society. To Mapplethorpe, she represented a fusion of art, eroticism, and physical performance, allowing him to explore themes such as beauty, female strength, desire, and the human body.

1981

Robert moved to Bleecker Street with his boyfriend, Milton Moore, though he maintained his studio in Bond Street. He published his third portfolio, Z, a collection of photographs of black male subjects. The bodies of black men became increasingly central to his artistic research and a focus of his sentimental relations. One year after Ronald Reagan’s election, the first deaths occurred caused by a virus that was later identified as the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV).

1982

Robert hired his brother Edward to be his assistant. When he in turn became a photographer, Mapplethorpe asked Edward to change his last name to Maxey to set the two of them apart in the photography world. That same year, AIDS was officially recognized in the United States.

1983

Robert fulfilled one of his youthful dreams when he photographed Andy Warhol and in turn, had his portrait painted by the artist. To accompany his exhibition of the same name at the Leo Castelli gallery, he published the famous volume Lady (printed in the US by The Viking, New York) with a series of portraits of Lisa Lyon; texts by Germano Celant and Bruce Chatwin accompanied the photographs. Mapplethorpe’s works were shown in a major exhibition curated by Germano Celant in Palazzo Fortuny, in Venice. A great debate arose around the event, forcing the organizers to ban the exhibition for minors.

1984

Robert directed a short color film starring Lisa Lyon. He titled it Lady, like the book published the previous year. In his New York studio, Andy Warhol asked Keith Haring to paint the icon Grace Jones, wearing nothing but sculptural adornments. Warhol commissioned Mapplethorpe to capture Haring’s sprawling painting on Jones, which looked just like his well-known street art.

1986

Though Mapplethorpe was hospitalized for complications of pneumonia and was diagnosed with AIDS, he continued to take on ambitious projects. In November, Gia Carangi, a top model of international renown who had appeared on the covers of the most important US magazines, died of AIDS; she was one of the first women killed by the HIV virus in the United States.

1987

In January, Sam Wagstaff died of HIV-associated pneumonia. One month later, Andy Warhol died, too, out of post-operative complications.

1988

After a critical decline in his health, Mapplethorpe, in an effort to protect his artistic legacy, established the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, a nonprofit organization whose aim was to promote photography at the institutional level and fund research in the fight against AIDS. His first major retrospective in the US opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In December, the show The Perfect Moment opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. George H.W. Bush moved into the White House, the 41st president of the United States. With Republicans at the helm, the director of the “Times” authorized the use of the word “gay” to refer to homosexuals in the magazine, thus violating a previous memo dated 1981 where its use had been categorically forbidden.

1989

Mapplethorpe was hospitalized once again, but his body was already too consumed by the disease to undergo a new cycle of experimental therapy. He died in Boston, on March 9th of respiratory failure. Two funerals were held: one organized by the family, the other by the Whitney Museum. The Perfect Moment opened in Chicago, while the exhibition that was to be held in  Washington D.C. was cancelled two weeks before the opening. The Corcoran Gallery of Art, where the show was to be held, had been swamped by complaints. This episode led to a broad national debate on the use of public funding to support art with a powerful erotic charge, but also on freedom of expression, and censorship. As a response, the exhibition was welcomed by the Washington Project for the Arts, registering a record turnout, while senator Jesse Helms – an ultraconservative who in 1987 pushed for a series of laws forbidding the use of public funds to raise awareness around the AIDS epidemic – shredded copies of several of the exhibited photographs as a form of protest.

1990

In Cincinnati, Ohio, the inauguration of the exhibition that had caused such a scandal – The Perfect Moment – was suspended by the police, who temporarily shut down the Contemporary Art Center and pressed charges against the institute and its director, accusing them of using the taxpayers’ money to promote obscenity and encourage pornography. The case drew ample media attention and was brought to court, where however both the director and the gallery were fully acquitted.