Large Photograph Tiger Lillies Robert Mapplethorpe Silver Gelatin Photo Flowers, c.1987

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ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE, 1946-1989
'TIGER LILY', 1987

Silver gelatin print
bearing the photographer's copyright stamp on the reverse
this is not … Read more ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE, 1946-1989
'TIGER LILY', 1987

Silver gelatin print
bearing the photographer's copyright stamp on the reverse
this is not hand signed and there is no edition number. this might be a proof print.
Image 48.7 x 48.7 cm 19⅛x 19⅛in.);
sheet 60.5 x 50.5 cm (24 x 20in.)

Robert Mapplethorpe 1946 – 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 nude photos, self-portraits, and still-life images.
He attended the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he majored in Graphic Arts but dropped out in 1969 before finishing his degree.
Mapplethorpe lived with his girlfriend Patti Smith from 1967 to 1972, and she supported him by working in bookstores. They created art together, and maintained a close friendship throughout Mapplethorpe's life. Mapplethorpe took his first photographs in the late 1960s or early 1970s using a vintage Polaroid camera. He also designed and sold his own jewelry, which was worn by Andy Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro. During this period Mapplethorpe also produced drawings, collages, and found object sculptures. In 1972, Mapplethorpe met art curator Sam Wagstaff, who would become his mentor, lover, patron, and lifetime companion. In the mid-1970s, Wagstaff acquired a Hasselblad medium-format camera and Mapplethorpe began taking photographs of a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, including artists, composers, and socialites. During this time, he became friends with New Orleans artist George Dureau, whose work had such a profound impact on Mapplethorpe that he restaged many of Dureau's early photographs. From 1977 until 1980, Mapplethorpe was the lover of writer and Drummer editor Jack Fritscher, who introduced him to the Mineshaft (a members-only BDSM gay leather bar and sex club in Manhattan).Mapplethorpe took many pictures of the Mineshaft and was at one point its official photographer (… "After dinner I go to the Mineshaft." His most controversial works documented and examined the gay male BDSM subculture of New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Mapplethorpe's 1989 exhibition, 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.
By the 1980s, Mapplethorpe's subject matter focused on statuesque male and female nudes, delicate flower still lifes, and highly formal portraits of artists and celebrities. Mapplethorpe's first studio was at 24 Bond Street in Manhattan. In the 1980s, Wagstaff bought a top-floor loft at 35 West 23rd Street for Robert, where he resided, also using it as a photo-shoot studio. He kept the Bond Street loft as his darkroom. In 1988, Mapplethorpe selected Patricia Morrisroe to write his biography, which was based on more than 300 interviews with celebrities, critics, lovers, and Mapplethorpe himself. Mapplethorpe died at age 42 due to complications from HIV AIDS in a Boston hospital.
Nearly a year before his death, Mapplethorpe helped found the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Inc.
Mapplethorpe worked primarily in a studio, and almost exclusively in black and white, with the exception of some of his later work and his final exhibit "New Colors". His body of work features a wide range of subjects and the greater part of his work is on erotic imagery. He would refer to some of his own work as pornographic, with the aim of arousing the viewer, but which could also be regarded as high art. His erotic art explored a wide range of sexual subjects, depicting the BDSM subculture of New York in the 1970s, portrayals of black male nudes, and classical nudes of female bodybuilders. One of the black models he worked with regularly was Derrick Cross, whose pose for the self-titled image in 1983 has been compared to the Farnese Hercules. Mapplethorpe was a participant observer for much of his erotic photography, participating in the sexual acts which he was photographing and engaging his models sexually. Other subjects included flowers, especially orchids and calla lilies, children, statues, and celebrities and other artists, including Andy Warhol, Louise Bourgeois, Deborah Harry, Kathy Acker, Richard Gere, Peter Gabriel, Grace Jones, Amanda Lear, Laurie Anderson, Iggy Pop, Philip Glass, David Hockney, Cindy Sherman, Joan Armatrading, and Patti Smith. Smith was a longtime roommate of Mapplethorpe and a frequent subject in his photography, including a stark, iconic photograph that appears on the cover of Smith's first album, Horses. His work often made reference to religious or classical imagery, such as a 1975 portrait of Patti Smith from 1986 which recalls Albrecht Dürer's 1500 self-portrait. Between 1980 and 1983, Mapplethorpe created over 150 photographs of bodybuilder Lisa Lyon, culminating in the 1983 photobook Lady, Lisa Lyon, published by Viking Press and with text by Bruce Chatwin.
Robert took areas of dark human consent and made them into art. He worked without apology, investing the homosexual with grandeur, masculinity, and enviable nobility. Without affectation, he created a presence that was wholly male without sacrificing feminine grace. He was not looking to make a political statement or an announcement of his evolving sexual persuasion. He was presenting something new, something not seen or explored as he saw and explored it. Robert sought to elevate aspects of male experience, to imbue homosexuality with mysticism. As Jean Cocteau said of a Genet poem, "His obscenity is never obscene."
The 1986 solo exhibition "Black Males" and the subsequent book The Black Book sparked controversy for their depiction of black men. The images, erotic depictions of black men, were widely criticized for being exploitative. The work was largely phallocentric and sculptural, focusing on segments of the subject's bodies. His purported intention with these photographs and the use of black men as models was the pursuit of the Platonic ideal. Mapplethorpe's initial interest in the black male form was inspired by films like Mandingo and the interrogation scene in Cruising, in which an unknown black character enters the interrogation room and slaps the protagonist across the face.
Criticism was the subject of a work by American conceptual artist Glenn Ligon, Notes on the Margins of the Black Book (1991–1993). Ligon juxtaposes Mapplethorpe's 91 images of black men in the 1988 publication Black Book with critical texts and personal reactions about the work to complicate the racial undertones of the imagery.
In 1992, author Paul Russell dedicated his novel Boys of Life to Mapplethorpe, as well as to Karl Keller and Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Mapplethorpe: A Biography by Patricia Morrisroe was published by Random House in 1995.
Patti Smith published books titled The Coral Sea (1996) and Just Kids (2010). Both were dedicated to Mapplethorpe, and the latter won the 2010 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
In September 1999, Arena Editions published Pictures, a monograph that reintroduced Mapplethorpe's sex pictures. In 2000, Pictures was seized by two South Australian plain-clothes detectives from an Adelaide bookshop in the belief that the book breached indecency and obscenity laws. Police sent the book to the Canberra-based Office of Film and Literature Classification after the state Attorney-General's Department deftly decided not to get involved in the mounting publicity storm. Eventually, the OFLC board agreed unanimously that the book, imported from the United States, should remain freely available and unrestricted.
In September 2007, Prestel published Mapplethorpe: Polaroids, a collection of 183 of approximately 1,500 existing Mapplethorpe polaroids. This book accompanies an exhibition by the Whitney Museum of American Art in May 2008.
In 2008, Robert Mapplethorpe was named by Equality Forum as one of its 31 Icons of the 2015 LGBT History Month.
In June 2016, Belgian fashion designer Raf Simons debuted his men's Spring 2017 collection inspired by Mapplethorpe's work and featuring several of his photographs printed onto shirts, jackets, and smocks.
The American documentary film, Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, was released in 2016. It was directed and executive produced by Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey, and produced by Katharina Otto-Bernstein.
In 2019 and 2020, the Guggenheim Museum in New York City hosted Implicit Tensions, an exhibition of many of Mapplethorpe's works.
In collaboration with the Mapplethorpe Foundation, jeweler Gaia Repossi created a jewelry collection inspired by Mapplethorpe in 2021.
Art market
In 2017, a 1987 Mapplethorpe self-portrait platinum print was auctioned for £450,000, making it the most expensive Mapplethorpe photograph ever sold.
In April 2023, Phillips auctioned Man in Polyester Suit (1980) for an above-estimate $355,600. See less