‘It remains an open question whether he was truly a great photographer. He had a tremendous gift for self-publicity, and undoubtedly the element of outrage in his earlier work helped him swiftly towards fame and fortune.’
This remark in a short obituary in The Times that I found tugged inside Robert Mapplethorpe The Black Book, the infamous 1986 publication of muscular, well-endowed black male nudes, sums up the attitude towards the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe around the time of his death of Aids in 1989.
His star has risen in the decades after his death and I don’t think there are many art critics who would openly doubt whether he was ‘truly a great photographer’. But it is good to remind ourselves that his fame, at least in Europe, wasn’t immediate.
In the exhibition catalogue from the National Portrait Gallery the curators write: ‘Robert Mapplethorpe’s work received its first major exposure in Britain at the Institute of Contemporary Arts three and a half years ago. The impact on visitors to the exhibition was inevitably tempered by the wide range of subject material and the shock to our sensibilities of the homo-erotic photographs, the like of which had never been seen on the walls of a British gallery before.’
The National Portrait Gallery did not make the same mistake and showed a much more conventional side of Mapplethorpe, focusing of ‘straight’ portraits. It only featured one male nude, cradling a cat like a baby.
The ICA catalogue shows a wider variety of work and includes what the obituary in The Times calls ‘the much-parodied, much-berated “Man in a Polyester suit”, a 1980 photo of the artist’s lover Milton Moore wearing a three piece suit with his penis exposed.
It’s difficult what to make of a photograph like that. Even in these current times we are much more used to female than male nude photography. And white men are more often portrayed than black men. Robert Mapplethorpe’s portraits of nude black men are still an anomaly in art. But at least most people would now agree that Robert Mapplethorpe was a truly great photographer.