Wikipedia entry
Introduction
Robert Michael Mapplethorpe ( MAY-pəl-thorp; November 4, 1946 – March 9, 1989) was an American photographer, best known for his black-and-white photographs. His work featured an array of subjects, including celebrity portraits, male and female nudes, self-portraits, and still-life images. His most controversial works documented and examined the gay male BDSM subculture of New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A 1989 exhibition of Mapplethorpe's work, titled Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment, sparked a debate in the United States concerning both use of public funds for "obscene" artwork and the Constitutional limits of free speech in the United States.
Wikidata
Q312786
View or edit the full Wikipedia entry
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License
Getty record
Introduction
Mapplethorpe studied painting at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he met singer/poet Patti Smith in 1968, whom he later photographed for her album covers. His initial interest in photography took the form of collages from photographs he found, but in 1972 he began to take pictures with a Polaroid camera. His images are classical and formal in appearance, his favorites subjects being male nudes, flowers, and still lifes. His homoerotic images became the subject of a much publicized obscenity charge in 1990 involving the Cincinnati Art Museum. Mapplethorpe also did a series of self-portraits toward the end of his life, documenting his deteriorating health from AIDS.
Nationality
American
Gender
Male
Roles
Artist, Collagist, Multimedia Artist, Painter, Photographer, Sculptor
Names
Robert Mapplethorpe, Bob Mapplethorpe, Robert Maplethorpe
Ulan
500090430
View the full Getty record
Information from Getty’s Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License

Works

44 works online

Exhibitions

View all 22 exhibitions

Publications

  • Among Others: Blackness at MoMA Charlotte Barat and Darby English, 2019 Hardcover, 488 pages
  • Photography at MoMA: 1960 to Now Edited by Quentin Bajac, Lucy Gallun, Roxana Marcoci, and Sarah Hermanson Meister, 2015 Hardcover, 368 pages
  • The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today Roxana Marcoci. Essays by Roxana Marcoci, Geoffrey Batchen, and Tobia Bezzola, 2010 Exhibition catalogue, Hardcover, 256 pages
Licensing

If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA’s collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).

MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit https://www.moma.org/research/circulating-film.

If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA’s archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].

Feedback

This record is a work in progress. If you have additional information or spotted an error, please send feedback to [email protected].