“I always thought I was good. That’s why it was so frustrating when other people didn’t agree.” – Ro
“I always thought I was good. That’s why it was so frustrating when other people didn’t agree.” – Robert Mapplethorpe.Picture: Mapplethorpe (November 4, 1946 – March 9, 1989), Self-Portrait, 1980. c/o Mapplethorpe Foundation..Robert Mapplethorpe, who died twenty-eight years ago today, was an American “photographer whose widely exhibited pictures combined classical beauty with sometimes shocking matter,” according to his New York Times obituary..Born in Queens, Mapplethorpe studied graphic arts at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, though he dropped out in 1969. Between 1967 and 1972, Mapplethorpe and artist-musician Patti Smith lived together, initially as lovers and then, after Mapplethorpe’s awakening as a gay man, as close friends. In the 1970s, he gained attention for his black-and-white photographs of the male figure, many of which explicitly were homoerotic..As he developed as an artist, Mapplethorpe’s subjects came to include celebrities, children, flowers, male and female nudes, and New York City’s underground BDSM scene. “No matter how paltry or outrageous the subject before the camera,” the New York Times continued, “he rendered it with the same cool, almost clinically dispassionate gaze.”.“Robert took areas of dark human consent and made them into art,” Patti Smith wrote in “Just Kids.” “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 Cocteau said of a Genet poem, ‘His obscenity is never obscene.’”.Robert Mapplethorpe died of AIDS-related illness on March 9, 1989; he was forty-two..After his death, an exhibition of his work, “The Perfect Moment,” became the focus of a national debate over censorship, homosexuality, and public funding of the arts. #lgbthistory #HavePrideInHistory #RobertMapplethorpe (at New York, New York) -- source link
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