Pushing Over the Fence: Two Robert Mapplethorpe Exhibitions
“Ken Moody and Robert Sherman” (1984), by Robert Mapplethorpe. (c) Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation Photographer Mapplethorpe is feted at the Getty and LACMA We have celebrated or embraced a number of distinguished photographers in recent years, from Walker Evans and W. Eugene Smith to Sebastião Salgado and Josef Koudelka. But no one seems to have received more attention than Robert Mapplethorpe, who has been given the posthumous honor of a retrospective so large that it is being shown in two venues, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum. Well, part of the reason for that is because in 2011 the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation bequeathed nearly 2,000 works to these bastions of fine art. And what better way to reciprocate, right? Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium is on view through July 31, 2016. The exhibitions are accompanied by two definitive catalogues, Robert Mapplethorpe: The Archives and Robert Mapplethorpe: The Photographs. Both are essential if one wishes to appreciate Mapplethorpe from top to bottom. However, to more fully understand him one might want to throw in Patti Smith’s Just Kids, her memoir of life with Robert in the late 1960s and…
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