Robert Mapplethorpe
His photographs of flowers, faces and gay sexuality were perfectly composed – and sparked America’s fiercest battle over art and censorship.
Robert Mapplethorpe grew up in a Catholic family in Queens, New York, and studied art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. In 1967 he met the young poet Patti Smith; they became lovers and lived together in poverty at the Chelsea Hotel. Even after he realised that he was gay, they remained lifelong friends, as Smith described in her memoir “Just Kids”.
In the early 1970s he took up photography. With the support of the collector Sam Wagstaff, who became his lover and patron, he developed a style of classical perfection: black-and-white portraits of artists and celebrities, sculptural nudes, flowers – and explicit images of New York’s gay sadomasochistic scene, collected in his “X Portfolio”.
In 1986 he was diagnosed with AIDS. In the same year he founded the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, which supports photography and AIDS research. He died in Boston in 1989, aged 42.
Shortly after his death his retrospective “The Perfect Moment” became the centre of a national controversy over public funding for art. In 1990 the director of a museum in Cincinnati was charged with obscenity for showing the photographs – and acquitted by a jury.