A daily chronicle of creativity in film, TV, music, arts, and entertainment, produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from November 2014 – March 2020. Host John Horn leads the conversation, accompanied by the nation's most plugged-in cultural journalists.
Obsessed with form, Robert Mapplethorpe was an exacting portraitist, still-life photographer and documentarian of the gay leather scene in 1960s and '70s New York. But to many modern viewers, he's best remembered as the photographer whose art went on trial.
In 1990, his work sparked a major controversy over government funding for the arts. It also led to the first trial in which obscenity charges were brought against a museum director, Dannis Barrie of the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center. Barrie was acquitted and Mapplethorpe’s work has only grown in stature and influence since then. But his work has never received a major show in Los Angeles — until now.
LACMA, the Getty Museum and the Mapplethorpe Foundation have teamed up to present an enormous retrospective called “The Perfect Medium," a title that riffs on Mapplethorpe's infamous touring show "The Perfect Moment."
When The Frame's John Horn met with The Mapplethorpe Foundation President Michael Ward Stout, he began by asking: What took L.A. so long?
Why is it that someone as important as Robert Mapplethorpe never had a show in Los Angeles before?
Mapplethorpe died in March 1989. In June, suddenly, this controversy arose in Washington involving the famous senator from North Carolina, Jesse Helms, and the Corcoran Gallery, which canceled an exhibition which had been touring from when Mapplethorpe was still alive. There ensued this tremendous controversy about the National Endowment for the Arts, and government funding for the arts. There was so much Mapplethorpe on the news.
By April 1990, that exhibition was still traveling. It traveled to Cincinnati, where there was another type of big controversy. The museum director was arrested for promoting obscenity and pornography. There was a famous trial.
All the sudden there was too much Mapplethorpe. Certain museums wanted to have Mapplethorpe exhibitions because they wanted to exploit this attention. We, [The Mapplethorpe Foundation], started to say no.
They were just trying to make headlines.
I think so. I wanted to concentrate on Europe. So we started to say 'no' frequently.
I want to know more about your relationship to Robert Mapplethorpe. How did you know him and what was important to him about what happened after his death?
I knew Mapplethorpe just from being approximately the same age, being in New York and being part of what we still call the art world. I was a lawyer working with artists. I was a person who very often went to the famous Max's Kansas City restaurant and bar. Robert was there, often with Patti Smith. But I didn't know him well.
In 1980 or 1981 he contacted a mutual friend and a client because he wanted to work with me. He felt that because I'd represented Salvador Dalí for a number of years, I must be very connected in Europe. He was interested in licensing his designs. And then we became friends in that process.
When he became ill — he was diagnosed with an HIV infection, pneumonia, in fact — in September 1986, I was in Geneva. He called and said, I have it. And I'm probably going to die. You have to come home right away. Which I did. By the time I got home, he was recovering. And then we started to talk about his estate plan, which fascinated him. He never thought he would die. Since he had no family goals in the estate plan, we talked about a foundation.
Anyone who knows Mapplethorpe knows he was a New York artist. And yet the Foundation's massive 2011 gift of his work was to the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Getty Museum of Art. How did this New York artist end up having all of his work in Southern California?
There's nothing about a geographic location that should dictate where you should put someone's life work, particularly when they consist of materials that are difficult to care for. Generally, there aren't many archives connected to museums which have the capacity to care for photography.
In terms of storage, of archive?
Right. There are fewer than five in the United States, and the Getty is by far the most equipped. However, the Getty doesn't have contemporary museum exhibition programming, and Mapplethorpe thought of himself as a contemporary artist. Therefore, LACMA is a partner in this joint venture.
Is there some part of the exhibit that you're particularly excited about, that illuminates the way in which he saw himself as an artist?
Robert Mapplethorpe has become very well known for what people call his sex pictures. Right now the Getty is exhibiting something called the X Portfolio, 13 very strong, difficult pictures of homosexual sex acts. It's also being shown in Oslo. And while that's interesting and it draws big crowds, Mapplethorpe's total output of that subject matter I don't think is more than 30 pictures. The total number of images which he chose to created his limited editions are more than 2,000.
Unfortunately, people know the sex pictures well. It's unfair to the artist. He created that work within a year-and-a-half period — it started to bore him, actually — and he moved on. And he became a great portrait artist and still life artist, even a documentarian. Everyone wants to see those sex pictures and they will, but people should take a good look at the great portraits he took, and the beautiful flowers and still lifes that are in both [the Getty and LACMA] — and lighten up a little about the sex pictures.
"Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium" opens on March 20 at LACMA and runs through July 31.