Robert Mapplethorpe valuation
Photographed flowers, portraits and sex with exactly the same formal control.
Robert Mapplethorpe was born in Queens in 1946, studied at Pratt, and began with collage and Polaroids before a Hasselblad and the studio took over.
What a work by Robert Mapplethorpe is worth
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Bio
Robert Mapplethorpe was born in Queens in 1946, studied at Pratt, and began with collage and Polaroids before a Hasselblad and the studio took over. The work is classical in its handling and deliberately provocative in its subjects, treated identically: calla lilies, portraits of Patti Smith and Louise Bourgeois and Andy Warhol, bodybuilders, and the explicit X Portfolio. The 1989 travelling exhibition The Perfect Moment, after his death from AIDS at forty-two, became the centre of the American culture wars and led to an obscenity prosecution in Cincinnati, of which the museum was acquitted.
Prints are editioned, usually in tens, and print date matters: lifetime prints and prints made under the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation after 1989 are separate categories, and the Foundation's stamp on the verso is the marker. He also made unique objects — Polaroids, and prints presented in fabric-covered or mirrored frames of his own design, where the frame is part of the work and replacing it destroys value. Signature, edition and copyright stamps are on the verso or the mount. Gelatin silver prints from the period are sensitive to light and to poor mounting.
Patti Smith, Sam Wagstaff and the archive
Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith lived together in New York in the late 1960s and stayed close after they parted, and his photograph of her on the cover of Horses, her first album, released in 1975, is among the best-known pictures he made. It was taken at the Fifth Avenue apartment of Sam Wagstaff, the curator and collector who became his partner and patron.
In 2011 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Trust jointly acquired his archive, largely as a gift from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. It runs to more than two thousand works, among them over two hundred drawings, collages and assemblages, around 1,100 non-editioned gelatin silver prints and a hundred Polaroids, together with some 120,000 negatives and 6,000 contact sheets. His negatives are therefore held in one place, which helps when a print's image or date is in question.
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