Robert Mapplethorpe
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. 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.
If you own a work by Robert Mapplethorpe
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.