More Mapplethorpe
The J. Paul Getty Museum and LACMA will each exhibit the photographer’s work.
The major retrospective of Robert Mapplethorpe’s work that the J. Paul Getty Museum and Los Angeles County Museum of Art promised four years ago when they jointly acquired some 2,000 images by the New York City photographer is set to open in 2016 in an exhibit at both museums.
The Getty’s part will run March 15 to July 31, 2016; the LACMA dates are March 20 to July 31, 2016, the two museums announced Thursday. The co-curators are Paul Martineau of the Getty and LACMA’s Britt Salvesen.
After it closes in L.A., the show will tour three museums: the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, where it will open Aug. 29, 2016, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and a third stop to be announced.
The exhibition at LACMA’s Broad Contemporary Art Museum and at the Getty Center will expand on smaller concurrent shows at the two museums in 2012 of some of their shared Mapplethorpe acquisition.
The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation had conveyed the photographs jointly to the Getty and LACMA in 2011.
The foundation received an undisclosed payment said to be far less than the estimated value of more than $30 million for the finished photographic prints and an additional trove of negatives, preliminary Polaroid studies, and nonphotographic artworks by Mapplethorpe that went to the Getty Research Institute.
LACMA’s 2012 show focused on the 39 images in Mapplethorpe’s X,Y,Z Portfolios of 1978-81. The X Portfolio consists of explicit and sadomasochistic images of gay sex, and the Z Portfolio portrays nude black male models who evoke classical Greek sculpture.
The Getty’s 2012 show sampled a variety of Mapplethorpe’s portraits and still lifes, among them his portrait of Patti Smith for the cover of “Horses,” the 1975 debut album that made her a rock star.
The 2016 show at LACMA and the Getty will aim for two “complementary presentations ... designed to highlight different aspects of [Mapplethorpe’s] complex oeuvre,” the museums’ announcement said.
LACMA’s portion will portray “the artist’s relationship to New York’s sexual and artistic undergrounds, as well as his experimentation with a variety of media.” To provide context, LACMA will include other works from its collection by some of Mapplethorpe’s contemporaries.
The Getty will focus on other aspects of Mapplethorpe’s aesthetic: his “disciplined studio practice and his fascination with classical form and the fine photographic print.”
It was the sensational side that made Mapplethorpe a household name shortly after his death from AIDS-related causes in March 1989 at age 42. A retrospective show, “Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment,” had been seen at Philadelphia and Chicago museums in 1988 and 1989 without serious objections being raised. It was scheduled to move to the now-defunct Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, but the Corcoran backed out after Jesse Helms, a conservative North Carolina senator, expressed outrage after learning the National Endowment for the Arts had made a $30,000 grant for the show.
The NEA’s role became a cause celebre, as politicians who wanted to rein in government arts funding condemned Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic images as an affront to U.S. taxpayers.