MAPPLETHORPE, Robert | Mirrors
New York: Random House, 1993.
12’ x 12”; 9 duotone plates plus one tipped-in plate; cream wrappers. In a cream dust jacket stamped in silver; slight soiling and scuffing.With a four-page exhibition insert laid in.
First edition of 700, 300 copies hand-bound, numbered and signed, this is one of 400 copies. Inscribed by Jerry Kelly to Glenn Horowitz: “from ‘the designer’ Jerry Kelly to Glenn Horowitz”. With a poem by Patti Smith and an essay by Germano Celant.
In 1993, four years after Robert Mapplethorpe succumbed to AIDS, the Guggenheim received a gift of approximately 200 photographs and unique objects from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, initiating the museum’s photography collection. Mirrors is a commemorative book of the eponymous exhibition of self-portraits celebrating the gift. Patti Smith, Mapplethorpe’s longtime friend, composed “Reflecting Robert” for the exhibition, and Germano Celant, the curator, contributed an essay.
Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–89) enrolled at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, in 1963, where he studied painting and sculpture and received his B.F.A. in 1970. During this time, he met artist, poet, and musician Patti Smith (1946– ). She encouraged his work and posed for numerous portraits when they lived together in Brooklyn and in the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan, a gathering place for artists, writers, and musicians in the early 1970s.
It was not Mapplethorpe’s original intention to be a photographer, and from 1970 to 1974, he mainly made assemblage constructions that incorporate images of men from pornographic magazines with found objects and painting. In order to create his own images for these collages, Mapplethorpe turned to photography, initially using a Polaroid SX-70 camera. Interested in portraiture, Mapplethorpe worked as a staff photographer for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. He also produced album covers for Smith and the group Television, and at the same time photographed socialites and celebrities such as John Paul Getty III and Carolina Herrera.
Two of Mapplethorpe’s friends were influential in his continuing exploration of photography as a means of art making. He met John McKendry, Curator of Prints and Photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1971. The curator bought Mapplethorpe his first camera and persuaded him to take up photography full-time. Mapplethorpe traveled to Europe for the first time with McKendry, where he was introduced to many of the collectors who later became sitters for portraits. Curator and photography collector Sam Wagstaff, whom he met in 1972, became Mapplethorpe’s friend and eventual lover, encouraging the photographer’s development, gallery associations, and career course. Mapplethorpe’s diverse work – homoerotic images, floral still lifes, pictures of children, commissioned portraits, mixed-media sculpture – is united by the constancy of his approach and technique. The surfaces of his prints offer a seemingly endless gradation of blacks and whites, shadow and light, and regardless of subject, his images are both elegant and provocative.