Robert Mapplethorpe

In 1969, after attending art school at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, Mapplethorpe moved with his then lover Patti Smith to the legendary bohemian haunt, the Chelsea Hotel.

The Chelsea later became infamous as the place the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious stabbed Nancy Spungen to death in 1978 and before that, in 1953, where Dylan Thomas spent his dying hours after consuming 18 straight whiskies. But it was also a place of extreme creative productivity: where Beat poet Allen Ginsberg hung out and where William S Burroughs wrote 'Naked Lunch’; where composer Virgil Thompson worked, and where experimental filmmakers like Harry Smith and Dakota (Sandy) Daley made films.

The Chelsea was immortalised by poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen (as was his sexual encounter there with Janis Joplin); Andy Warhol made his film ‘Chelsea Girls’ there in 1966 about his gang of ‘superstars’, and playwright Arthur Miller once said, ‘The Chelsea, whatever else it was, was a house of infinite toleration.’

Patti Smith later described herself and Mapplethorpe during their Chelsea days as ‘awkward struggling unknowns’, but it wouldn’t be long before their careers took off.

The first real exhibition Mapplethorpe was part of was at the Chelsea in 1970, a show organised by Stanley Amos at the gallery he ran in the hotel. Opening on Mapplethorpe’s 24th birthday, it included new collages Mapplethorpe was doing under the mentorship of Chelsea resident and friend, filmmaker Sandy Daley, herself testing out photo-emulsion on canvas.

The Chelsea show was seen by select artworld people who would later prove important to Mapplethorpe’s career. Many were taken by the young artist’s large wall works: 'Artforum’ editor Charles Cowles bought one, and John McKendry, curator of prints and photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, became interested in his work and would become a friend.

Even after they moved out of the Chelsea, Smith and Mapplethorpe remained part of the community – not least as, in their new loft, the pair didn’t have a toilet and had to use one at the hotel.

Robert Mapplethorpe’s close friend from 1967, Patti Smith was also his collaborator. Initially lovers, the pair found their best partnership as muses to each other. They were true soulmates.

Fluidly exchanging roles as artist and muse, Mapplethorpe was part of the image Smith constructed of herself and she of him. This was most famously revealed on the cover of her debut studio album 'Horses’, 1975, where Mapplethorpe caught Smith’s personal magnetism and self-conscious androgyny – the image becoming important to both their careers.

A Smith poem from 1971 – the year of her first public readings – sums up the impact late 1960s New York had on this most creative couple:

‘New York is the thing that seduced me.
New York is the thing that formed me.
New York is the thing that deformed me.
New York is the thing that perverted me.
New York is the thing that converted me.
And New York is the thing that I love too.’

Just as Mapplethorpe saw no distinction between the subjects in his images – bodies or flowers – he saw none between his life and his art. When he created portraits of famous artists, musicians, actors, models and gallerists, it wasn’t ‘just work’: figures like Andy Warhol, Debbie Harry, Grace Jones and Kathy Acker were also friends and members of the shared subcultures and communities of New York.

Mapplethorpe once told art critic Arthur C. Danto: ‘I prefer people I know, or at least people I have had conversations with, because it’s about a relationship, between photographer and subject. I’d like to think ideally I could hang out with the person and ideally maybe have a better experience photographing them.’

Mapplethorpe hung out at places like Max’s Kansas City nightclub, later immortalising the characters he met there. (As did Lou Reed in his classic 'Walk on the Wild Side’, the 1972 song depicting Andy Warhol and his coterie of Factory ‘superstars’, like transgender actresses Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn, who also haunted Max’s legendary back room.)

Just as important a scene for Mapplethorpe was that of the West Village gay bars he cruised, and the downtown S&M community he began increasingly to bring into his work.

The portrait was a central element of Mapplethorpe’s artistic practice. His portraits of society figures and cultural idols – sometimes as staff photographer for Warhol’s 'Interview’ magazine – form a sprawling inventory of the avant-garde and the influential:

David Croland – Mapplethorpe’s first official boyfriend – appeared many times in front of his camera. After modelling for Mapplethorpe, Croland would later become an illustrator for Vogue and other fashion magazines.

Mapplethorpe photographed musician Philip Glass and experimental theatre director Robert Wilson same year their seminal contemporary opera 'Einstein on the Beach’ premiered, 1976.

He first shot fashion designer Carolina Herrera on a trip to Mustique, then later at New York’s Mayfair Hotel using just a simple lighting kit, with no assistant and her husband holding the lights.

He made an icon of tall Jamaican Grace Jones – first a model before finding fame as a singer – who lived with fellow models Jerry Hall and Jessica Lange in the late ’70s.

The year Mapplethorpe made this portrait of actress and model Isabella Rossellini, 1988, she was the subject of an entire exhibition called 'Portrait of a Woman’, at the Musée d’Art moderne in Paris.

In the late 1970s, Mapplethorpe’s fame and status brought the giants of the artworld to his studio.

In 1978, he captured eleven of the most influential in a composite portrait known as 'Downtown Art Dealers’, then in 1986 made a book with Richard Marshall, curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, called ’50 New York Artists: A Critical Selection of Painters and Sculptors Working in New York’.

'50 New York Artists’ remains a fascinating survey of the city’s most important artists of the day, Mapplethorpe shooting each artist – Richard Serra, Chuck Close, Andy Warhol – with an example of their work.

As, by then, a highly-regarded artist himself, Mapplethorpe’s own image was included, the only other photographer alongside Cindy Sherman. But doubtless the most famous image from the book is that of Louise Bourgeois smiling mischievously to the camera holding her phallic 1968 sculpture 'Fillette’ under her arm.

Described by the New York Times as ‘tall, handsome and rich’ – Sam Wagstaff was a legendary figure in the international art world of the 1970s and ’80s. He was also Mapplethorpe’s long-term lover, benefactor and patron.

Wagstaff and Mapplethorpe – born the same day, twenty-five years apart – met in 1972. The independently wealthy Wagstaff took Mapplethorpe under his wing, offering financial and emotional support. He bought Mapplethorpe his studio loft in 1975 and supported him in other ways, promoting his work tirelessly.

Wagstaff’s status in the artworld – as curator at the Wadsworth Atheneum in the early 1960s and later, encouraged by Mapplethorpe, as one of the first serious private collectors of photography – helped add legitimacy to Mapplethorpe when he was creating some of his most shocking work at the beginning of his career (Wagstaff called Mapplethorpe’s early erotic pictures ‘elegant’).

Together they were a powerful couple, their lives entwined in spite of the fact that they each continued to move between other loves. Mapplethorpe partially inherited Wagstaff’s not inconsiderable fortune in 1987, only two years before his own death.

In her memoir 'Just Kids’ Patti Smith recalled how she ‘saw them as two men who had a bond that could not be severed. The affirmation that came from each strengthened them. Both had stoic natures, but together they could reveal their vulnerabilities without shame, and trust each other with that knowledge.’

He was demonic but not evil, only as demonic as a small deity, mischievous but not without compassion. He was a ray where darkness fell.

— Patti Smith, ‘Meditations (his ritual)’

The Chelsea was like a doll’s house in the Twilight Zone, with a hundred rooms, each a small universe. I wandered the halls seeking its spirits, dead or alive. My adventures were mildly mischievous, tapping open a door slightly ajar and getting a glimpse of Virgil Thomson’s grand piano, or loitering before the nameplate of Arthur C. Clarke, hoping he might suddenly emerge. Occasionally I would bump into Gert Schiff, the German scholar, armed with volumes of Picasso, or Viva in Eau Sauvage. Everyone had something to offer and nobody appeared to have any money. Even the successful seemed to have just enough to live like extravagant bums.

— Patti Smith, 'Just Kids’