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From the Archives: Read What ARTnews Critics Said About Robert Mapplethorpe

LGBTQ+ Artists Having Institutional Shows This Pride Month

“Robert was smart with his board because he knew that appointing family members or life partners who can make emotional decisions is not always great to manage an artist’s legacy,”lawyer and Mapplethorpe Foundation president Michael Stout told ARTnews. Mapplethorpe instead assembled a board with professional specialties in both law (Stout is a copyright expert) and photography to shape the future and legacy of his impressive oeuvre.

Stout estimates that Mapplethorpe left behind approximately 14,000 prints, made from around 2,000 negatives, as well as a smaller number of sculptural objects and Polaroids. And in recent years, the management of the artist’s legacy has become an intricate feat: 15 galleries around the world manage the sales from the estate based on their respective geography. Gladstone Gallery, Morán Morán and Olga Korper Gallery are among the five in charge in North America; in Europe, Xavier Hufkins Gallery, Thaddaeus Ropac, Alison Jacques Gallery, and Galerie Thomas Schulte are half of the eight galleries holding representation deals; Brazil’s Galeria Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel manages the South American demand; and the Asian market is handled by Seoul’s Kukje Gallery.

At Art Basel next week, Gladstone Gallery, Ropac, and Alison Jacques will each have a Mapplethorpe work on offer. There’s also various institutional shows each year and brand partnerships, like those with Uniqlo, Chrome Hearts, and Honey Fucking Dijon, who license Mapplethorpe’s images. In its earliest days, the foundation only licensed paper-based products, such as postcards, calendars, and posters. “There was no way we could know if Robert would like a Chrome Hearts leather jacket, but we did it, as many artists started making licensing deals,” Stout added.

“We have to make careful decisions about licensing and act meticulously about publishing because books do survive,” Stout said. “They are not as popular in terms of sales anymore with everything being online, but Robert knew it was important to have them and he did an awful lot of books with different publishers.” He also added that the foundation’s trustees have reached a consensus of being “conservative about licensing” and that they aim “to make decisions that we thought he would have made.”

In addition to its management of Mapplethorpe’s art, the foundation has a lesser-known remit, acting as a grant-giving entity invested in supporting HIV research. “We largely depend on gallery sales, and running a photographer’s estate is more challenging than a painter’s,” he said about the given vast difference in pricing for the two mediums.

Mapplethorpe’s intriguingly enigmatic visual lexicon however has perhaps been more popular than ever in recent years. The first quarter of 2024 has so far seen four solo gallery exhibitions for the photographer: at London’s Alison Jacques, Gladstone in New York, Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris, and Morán Morán in Los Angeles, as well as a three-artist show, with Ann Craven and Mohammed Z. Rahman, at Phillida Reid in London. The Paris and LA shows both had high-profile curators: fashion editor Edward Enninful and artist Jacolby Satterwhite, respectively. Last month, the Currier Museum of Art in New Hampshire opened the exhibition Filippo de Pisis and Robert Mapplethorpe which places the photographer’s work in conversation with that of the 20th-century Italian painter. Their mutual fascination with flowers anchors the show, which features 38 photographs, all on loan from the foundation. 

The Gladstone show, which closed in April at the gallery’s Upper East Side outpost, sought to shine a light on a lesser-known part of Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre, his three-dimensional assemblages and photographs in sculptural frames. The exhibition benefitted from the gallery space’s former life as a townhouse, as the installation conveyed a demure blend of theatricality and domesticity. His ca. 1972 Untitled (Coat Rack Sculpture), for example, occupied a corner with a lit lightbulb (in lieu of a coat) adjacent to a black-and-white photograph of artist Jay Johnson in which the same sculpture appears next to Johnson’s nude body. In front of a backyard-facing window was Open Book (1974), a large aluminum floor structure in which a quartet of photographs of penises sit above a sleek triangular base.

The recent Gladstone show followed the Guggenheim Museum’s year-long exhibition “Implicit Tensions” (2019), which presented a considerable group of Mapplethorpe’s mixed-media constructions for the first time. The ambitious undertaking was an extension of the foundation’s gift of 194 artworks to the Guggenheim in 1993, which also established a photography department at the museum and a gallery named in the late photographer’s honor.

“Before Mapplethorpe, photography frames were more incidental, reflecting the uneasy transition of the medium from page to wall,” Guggenheim associate curator Lauren Hinkson recently told ARTnews of the two-part show.The second part of her project invited living artists like Lyle Ashton Harris, Glenn Ligon, Zanele Muholi, and Catherine Opie to exhibit their own images about queer resilience as a response to the first part of the exhibition. “Like the work of any canonical figure, Mapplethorpe’s work and its meanings are neither stable nor static, but are continually open to reinterpretation as other artists offer alternate approaches to image-making,” Hinkson said.

New-generation queer creatives, on the other hand, still find inspiration in Mapplethorpe’s unabashed handling of carnality, whether in his allusive flowers or dramatically lit double fisted rears. Ludovic de Saint Sernin, a fast-rising French designer with cult following, unveiled his Mapplethorpe-inspired men’s collection, in collaboration with the foundation, during New York Fashion Week in February. Pop star Troye Sivan currently wears some of the pieces from the bondage-inspired collection in his ongoing word tour, Sweat. The leather-heavy garments veer away from Uniqlo’s 2015 T-shirt line which were printed with the artist’s more approachable photographs.

Inviting new perspectives has been one lucrative way for the Mapplethorpe Foundation to keep his legacy alive. A suite of gallery exhibitions curated by cultural luminaries, from Isabelle Huppert to Elton John or the recent Enninful and Satterwhite ones, activate his large oeuvre through different personal lenses. (Ropac’s Enninful-organized exhibition drew around 2,000 visitors on its opening day in March.)

For Satterwhite, the opportunity to curate a Mapplethorpe show finds resonance in his own practice, which also traverses themes of power, autonomy, and euphoria. The foundation gave the Brooklyn-based artist access to the photographer’s entire oeuvre, and the resulting show, titled “Animism, Faith, Violence, and Conquest,” included a medley of Mapplethorpe’s less-charted images about utopia, resistance, and devotion. The show’s titular themes are subjects Satterwhite explored about belief systems and survival while working towards his recent Metropolitan Museum of Art commission, A Metta Prayer (2023).

A 1982-dated photograph, for example, shows a television with a chain hanging from its bottom; an image from 1985 includes a young boy in pirate costume looking through a spyglass. “I was thinking about how to subvert video games and ideas of violence, surveillance, and conquest in my project,” Satterwhite told ARTnews. He noted that he has long dreamed of doing a project around Mapplethorpe, “but if I had the chance 10 years ago, the result would have totally been different,” he said. Organizing the show fresh off his Met commission, in which he marinated similar ideas of devotion, power, and toxicity in beauty, the artist said he felt closer to Mapplethorpe’s similar concerns at this point in his practice.  

Mapplethorpe’s gallery representation itself has been important in the shifting perspectives of the artist’s work. “The dominant aesthetic of Robert’s estate, with calla lilies and nudes, was established by the foundation and Robert Miller Gallery, which initially had an exclusive representation,” Stout, the foundation president, said. The foundation changing its representation to New York’s Sean Kelly gallery in the early 2000s, helped bring forth a more multivalent approach to Mapplethorpe. In 2003, with the help of Sean Kelly, Cindy Sherman organized the first of these artist-driven curatorial projects that are now done multiple times a year.

“The public reaction and a Roberta Smith review in the New York Times convinced us that we should let other people make decisions for exhibitions,” Stout said. “Even we still see works this way that we never saw or forgot about.”

The challenge for the Mapplethorpe Foundation these days is to run an endeavor with funding from a finite repertoire. In an effort to monitor sales in various price points and avoid exhibiting the same work concurrently in separate shows, the foundation has established what they internally call “a core system.” The layout helps the board and staff break down and control the types of images sold across the globe and maintain a balanced inventory in terms of value and future demand. The works with exceptionally iconic subjects such as Patti Smith, Mapplethorpe himself, or Andy Warhol, as well as calla lilies are “for more special moments,” Stout said. This system also helps the foundation shuffle works between different gallery inventories for an even distribution.

“When we started the foundation with Robert, we weren’t sure if we would go on for over 20 years,” Stout recalled. “We don’t have trustees making emotional decisions and holding onto sentimental pieces on our board—we just want to place everything well.”

Robert Mapplethorpe, Self Portrait, (1980).

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

“The gallery’s founder, Barbara Gladstone, had a close personal friendship with the artist during his lifetime when she exhibited his work from a project in which they collaborated. Her knowledge of the work is deep and historic,” Michael Ward Stout, the president of the foundation, said in a statement. “The foundation benefitted from a successful relationship with the Sean Kelly Gallery during the last many years, and it contributed significantly to the artist’s legacy. Going forward, we are enthusiastic to work with the Gladstone Gallery.”

A representative for Gladstone stressed that the split from Sean Kelly Gallery was “very amicable.” And Gladstone will only represent the estate in New York, as a variety of galleries represent the Mapplethorpe estate in other cities. Some of these galleries include Moran Bondaroff in Los Angeles, Xavier Hufkens Gallery in Brussels, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris, and many others.

During his lifetime, Mapplethorpe was represented primarily by the Robert Miller Gallery, which continued to handle the estate after Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989. In 1999, the gallery severed ties with the foundation, but then decided to stage a show of work that the foundation thought was similar to a show that was to be on view later that year at Cheim & Read, a gallery formed by two former Robert Miller Gallery employees. By 2003, the estate was being handled in New York exclusively by Sean Kelly Gallery.

The first exhibition at Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea will take place in spring 2018.

Jim, Sausalito (X Portfolio), 1977, gelatin silver print

THE J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM, LOS ANGELES. JOINTLY ACQUIRED BY THE J. PAUL GETTY TRUST AND THE LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART. PARTIAL GIFT OF THE ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE FOUNDATION; PARTIAL PURCHASE WITH FUNDS PROVIDED BY THE DAVID GEFFEN FOUNDATION AND THE J. PAUL GETTY TRUST. ©ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE FOUNDATION.

Rose, N.Y.C. (Y Portfolio), 1977, gelatin silver print

THE J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM, LOS ANGELES. JOINTLY ACQUIRED BY THE J. PAUL GETTY TRUST AND THE LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART. PARTIAL GIFT OF THE ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE FOUNDATION; PARTIAL PURCHASE WITH FUNDS PROVIDED BY THE DAVID GEFFEN FOUNDATION AND THE J. PAUL GETTY TRUST. ©ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE FOUNDATION.

Leigh Lee, N.Y.C. (Z Portfolio), 1980, gelatin silver print

THE J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM, LOS ANGELES. JOINTLY ACQUIRED BY THE J. PAUL GETTY TRUST AND THE LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART. PARTIAL GIFT OF THE ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE FOUNDATION; PARTIAL PURCHASE WITH FUNDS PROVIDED BY THE DAVID GEFFEN FOUNDATION AND THE J. PAUL GETTY TRUST. ©ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE FOUNDATION.

Still, it seemed, a chilling effect was in the air. For the next two decades, except for the Santa Monica Museum of Art’s re-creation of “The Perfect Moment” in conjunction with Showtime’s movie about the case, Mapplethorpe’s graphic images were rarely shown in U.S. art institutions, even as they packed museum galleries in Europe, Asia, and beyond.

Some American museum leaders undoubtedly thought the work was too hot to handle. But the artist’s low profile in his native country was also the result of a longtime strategy by his own foundation, which, in the wake of the obscenity trial, nixed several U.S. museums’ proposals for Mapplethorpe shows out of concern they would be sensationalized. “It was too overwhelming,” says Mapplethorpe Foundation president Michael Ward Stout. “People were losing track of the fact he was a serious artist.”

Now, two decades after it was denounced by Jesse Helms in Congress and almost sent Dennis Barrie to jail, the X Portfolio is finally coming out. Beginning October 21, in a space beyond immediate sightlines where labels note the content may not be appropriate for everyone, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will present each work in Mapplethorpe’s controversial series, including a picture of a finger inserted into a penis, and several scenes of objects being inserted into an anus. Two companion series will also be on view: The Y Portfolio (1978), featuring flower still lifes, and the Z Portfolio (1981), portraits of nude black males. Two days later, not far way, the Getty Museum will open its own tribute to the artist, a one-gallery show called “In Focus: Robert Mapplethorpe.” The museums are staging the exhibitions as a not-so-sneak peek at their spectacular joint acquisition, announced last year, of a trove of art and archives from the Mapplethorpe Foundation, including 2,000 photographs, 120,000 negatives, voluminous documentation of the obscenity trial, and much more. (The collections, which have since been appraised at $38 million, were mostly a gift from the Mapplethorpe foundation, with a little help from the David Geffen Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Trust.)

With its fat international resume, powerhouse institutional backing, and gay-friendly venue, the X Portfolio returns to public attention in a considerably different climate. Today’s audience, accustomed to contemporary museum fare like Paul McCarthy, not to mention cable and the Internet, won’t find Mapplethorpe’s sadomasochistic images particularly shocking, predicts LACMA director Michael Govan. “The context has changed,” he says. “People understand that while there’s quite provocative content, the focus on the human body and the human form is quite classical.” Several exhibitions in recent years have played up this connection, re-positioning the artist as a modern-day heir of the Renaissance and Baroque.

This new context provides a chance to move beyond a formal approach and look at many more sides of Mapplethorpe, says LACMA’s chief photography curator, Britt Salvesen. “There’s a lot to return to and think about and also reinterpret,” she says. She might post quotations from the obscenity proceedings inside the galleries or perhaps as outdoor projections; in a sense these too will show how times have changed. “Esthetically, no one feels the need to defend it as art,” Salvesen comments. “We have to move beyond that, if we’re put in the position of sort of defending the work.”

Now that no one’s expecting a bust, it’s clear that the show, staged in the midst of election season, will create a certain amount of buzz. But what kind? For it is also clear that Mapplethorpe’s work has not disappeared from the crosshairs of the right. Just two years ago, his photograph Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter, a 1979 portrait of two men clad in S&M gear, was targeted in an article published by a conservative website denouncing “Hide/Seek,” the National Portrait Gallery’s show about gay and lesbian identity in modern art. This was the same article that brought Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly to the attention of Republican Congressmen—and then to Smithsonian chief G. Wayne Clough, who removed it in the belief he could avert a debate over arts funding. The episode (which the Mapplethorpe Foundation, a sponsor of the show, protested), evoked the Corcoran’s cancellation of “The Perfect Moment back” in 1989 for the same ostensible reason. Like Mitt Romney’s recent pledge to kill the National Endowment for the Arts, the ants-in-the-crucifix controversy suggested that maybe circumstances haven’t changed so much after all.

Whatever the reaction from the right, says “Hide/Seek” co-curator Jonathan Katz, LACMA’s exhibition does reflect how institutional attitudes toward gay identity in modern art have come a long way—maybe. “It’s a funny transitional moment,” he comments. When sexuality is central to artist’s work, he observes, museums and the public have become more inclined to address it. But if it’s not—he cites Robert Rauschenberg, Charles Demuth, Agnes Martin, and Louise Nevelson as examples–their gay or lesbian identities still tend to remain out of bounds. (He is currently working on an exhibition proposal about Nevelson’s “performative persona” in relation to her closeted lesbianism.) In contrast, Mapplethorpe used series like the X and Z Portfolios to “frame our prejudices and clichés, and to present them back to us.” In that respect, any repercussions reflect the artist’s own intentions.

“Of course the brouhaha that his work raised was not unanticipated by Mapplethorpe,” Katz adds. “It was in some sense his raison d’être.”