Mapplethorpe, Robert (mā`pəlthôrp'), 1946–89, American photographer, b. New York City. He is known for his elegantly expressive black-and-white studies of male and female nudes, flowers, and celebrity portraits. He credited sculpture as an influence on his work and used traditional techniques of direct lighting and sharp focus to produce sleekly ravishing effects and gleaming surfaces. His photographs include homoerotic and sadomasochistic images, often glamorized and disturbing, which made him a controversial figure. Soon after his death from AIDS, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., canceled a traveling retrospective of his work in an unsuccessful attempt to avoid a debate in Congress over public funding by the National Endowment for the Arts of works deemed "objectionable" by fundamentalist religious groups and political conservatives. In 1990 a Cincinnati jury found that city's Contemporary Arts Center and its director not guilty of obscenity for exhibiting Mapplethorpe's photographs. His works are included in such volumes as Lady: Lisa Lyon (1983) and Robert Mapplethorpe: Certain People (1985).

Bibliography

See biography by P. Morrisoe (1995); studies by R. Marshall (1988) and A. C. Danto (1995); The Perfect Moment (CD-ROM, 1995).

Mapplethorpe, Robert

(born Nov. 4, 1946, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died March 9, 1989, Boston, Mass.) U.S. photographer. He attended the Pratt Institute (1963–70). By the mid 1970s he was pursuing what were to remain his favourite subjects throughout his career: still lifes, flowers, portraits of friends and celebrities, and homoerotic explorations of the male body. His compositions were generally stark, with his combination of cold studio light and precise focus creating dramatic tonal contrasts. His muscular male models were generally framed against plain backdrops, sometimes engaged in sexual activity or posed with sadomasochistic props such as leather and chains. His clear, unflinching style challenged viewers to confront this imagery. Moreover, the combination of his choice of subject matter with the photographs' formal beauty and grounding in art-historical traditions created what many saw as a tension between pornography and art. A posthumous retrospective exhibition of his work in 1990, funded partly by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), stirred a debate about government subsidies of “obscene” art and provoked Congress to enact restrictions on future NEA grants.