Word: art
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...years ago carried self-portraits on both front and back. There he was on one cover in a black leather jacket, sporting an updated biker haircut, with a cigarette dangling from his lips. It was the Mapplethorpe of whips and sexual appliances, the one who had careered into the art world in the late 1970s with images of homosexual sadomasochism. But on the back cover he offered a different version of himself, bare chested and slender, in pale makeup: the artist as breakable cherub, with a whiff of androgyny and maybe a hint of Pierrot, the pantomime clown. Perhaps...
...those two self-portraits, only the second is in the retrospective of Mapplethorpe's work currently on view at Manhattan's Whitney Museum of American Art. But both spirits, the dark leatherboy and the angel of light, preside jointly in most of the 111 works on display. The obsessions with sex and death that are palpable in his scenes of heavy leather are still visible in the phallic tumescence and mortal shadows of Calla Lily, 1984. The straightforward but unreal quality of the S-M images is there again in his portrait of Ken Moody and Robert Sherman...
...most visible photographers of his generation for a decade, but this year is a high-water mark in his career. The Whitney retrospective, which runs through Oct. 23, is his first one-man show at a major American museum in years. And in December, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia will open a somewhat larger Mapplethorpe exhibition that will travel to Chicago, Boston and Washington. With the era of sexual extremity now closed, some of Mapplethorpe's pictures look even more loaded and unnerving than they once did. But the durable qualities of his work are also appearing...
...Mapplethorpe, the camera is mostly just a device for distilling images that correspond to his obsessions. Some of the earliest pictures in the show, made soon after he finished studying art at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1970, are images simply torn from magazines and reworked. Others are Polaroids of himself or Rock Singer Patti Smith, for years his muse, companion and fellow traveler through the New York City avant-garde...
...Italian police last week began investigating rumors that the statue was taken from an illegal excavation in Sicily. Getty officials countered that they had attempted to check the same rumors last year -- to no avail. The case grew hotter when Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, claimed that the statue had been taken from the Sicily site to Geneva, then sold to the Getty by an English dealer. Museum officials called Hoving's allegations "purely speculative...