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From the Archives: Read What ARTnews Critics Said About Robert Mapplethorpe

LGBTQ+ Artists Having Institutional Shows This Pride Month

“Robert was smart with his board because he knew that appointing family members or life partners who can make emotional decisions is not always great to manage an artist’s legacy,” lawyer and Mapplethorpe Foundation president Michael Stout told ARTnews. Mapplethorpe instead assembled a board with professional specialties in both law (Stout is a copyright expert) and photography to shape the future and legacy of his impressive oeuvre.

Stout estimates that Mapplethorpe left behind approximately 14,000 prints, made from around 2,000 negatives, as well as a smaller number of sculptural objects and Polaroids. And in recent years, the management of the artist’s legacy has become an intricate feat: 15 galleries around the world manage the sales from the estate based on their respective geography. Gladstone Gallery, Morán Morán and Olga Korper Gallery are among the five in charge in North America; in Europe, Xavier Hufkins Gallery, Thaddaeus Ropac, Alison Jacques Gallery, and Galerie Thomas Schulte are half of the eight galleries holding representation deals; Brazil’s Galeria Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel manages the South American demand; and the Asian market is handled by Seoul’s Kukje Gallery.

At Art Basel next week, Gladstone Gallery, Ropac, and Alison Jacques will each have a Mapplethorpe work on offer. There’s also various institutional shows each year and brand partnerships, like those with Uniqlo, Chrome Hearts, and Honey Fucking Dijon, who license Mapplethorpe’s images. In its earliest days, the foundation only licensed paper-based products, such as postcards, calendars, and posters. “There was no way we could know if Robert would like a Chrome Hearts leather jacket, but we did it, as many artists started making licensing deals,” Stout added.

“We have to make careful decisions about licensing and act meticulously about publishing because books do survive,” Stout said. “They are not as popular in terms of sales anymore with everything being online, but Robert knew it was important to have them and he did an awful lot of books with different publishers.” He also added that the foundation’s trustees have reached a consensus of being “conservative about licensing” and that they aim “to make decisions that we thought he would have made.”

In addition to its management of Mapplethorpe’s art, the foundation has a lesser-known remit, acting as a grant-giving entity invested in supporting HIV research. “We largely depend on gallery sales, and running a photographer’s estate is more challenging than a painter’s,” he said about the given vast difference in pricing for the two mediums.

Mapplethorpe’s intriguingly enigmatic visual lexicon however has perhaps been more popular than ever in recent years. The first quarter of 2024 has so far seen four solo gallery exhibitions for the photographer: at London’s Alison Jacques, Gladstone in New York, Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris, and Morán Morán in Los Angeles, as well as a three-artist show, with Ann Craven and Mohammed Z. Rahman, at Phillida Reid in London. The Paris and LA shows both had high-profile curators: fashion editor Edward Enninful and artist Jacolby Satterwhite, respectively. Last month, the Currier Museum of Art in New Hampshire opened the exhibition Filippo de Pisis and Robert Mapplethorpe which places the photographer’s work in conversation with that of the 20th-century Italian painter. Their mutual fascination with flowers anchors the show, which features 38 photographs, all on loan from the foundation. 

The Gladstone show, which closed in April at the gallery’s Upper East Side outpost, sought to shine a light on a lesser-known part of Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre, his three-dimensional assemblages and photographs in sculptural frames. The exhibition benefitted from the gallery space’s former life as a townhouse, as the installation conveyed a demure blend of theatricality and domesticity. His ca. 1972 Untitled (Coat Rack Sculpture), for example, occupied a corner with a lit lightbulb (in lieu of a coat) adjacent to a black-and-white photograph of artist Jay Johnson in which the same sculpture appears next to Johnson’s nude body. In front of a backyard-facing window was Open Book (1974), a large aluminum floor structure in which a quartet of photographs of penises sit above a sleek triangular base.

The recent Gladstone show followed the Guggenheim Museum’s year-long exhibition “Implicit Tensions” (2019), which presented a considerable group of Mapplethorpe’s mixed-media constructions for the first time. The ambitious undertaking was an extension of the foundation’s gift of 194 artworks to the Guggenheim in 1993, which also established a photography department at the museum and a gallery named in the late photographer’s honor.

“Before Mapplethorpe, photography frames were more incidental, reflecting the uneasy transition of the medium from page to wall,” Guggenheim associate curator Lauren Hinkson recently told ARTnews of the two-part show.The second part of her project invited living artists like Lyle Ashton Harris, Glenn Ligon, Zanele Muholi, and Catherine Opie to exhibit their own images about queer resilience as a response to the first part of the exhibition. “Like the work of any canonical figure, Mapplethorpe’s work and its meanings are neither stable nor static, but are continually open to reinterpretation as other artists offer alternate approaches to image-making,” Hinkson said.

New-generation queer creatives, on the other hand, still find inspiration in Mapplethorpe’s unabashed handling of carnality, whether in his allusive flowers or dramatically lit double fisted rears. Ludovic de Saint Sernin, a fast-rising French designer with cult following, unveiled his Mapplethorpe-inspired men’s collection, in collaboration with the foundation, during New York Fashion Week in February. Pop star Troye Sivan currently wears some of the pieces from the bondage-inspired collection in his ongoing word tour, Sweat. The leather-heavy garments veer away from Uniqlo’s 2015 T-shirt line which were printed with the artist’s more approachable photographs.

Inviting new perspectives has been one lucrative way for the Mapplethorpe Foundation to keep his legacy alive. A suite of gallery exhibitions curated by cultural luminaries, from Isabelle Huppert to Elton John or the recent Enninful and Satterwhite ones, activate his large oeuvre through different personal lenses. (Ropac’s Enninful-organized exhibition drew around 2,000 visitors on its opening day in March.)

For Satterwhite, the opportunity to curate a Mapplethorpe show finds resonance in his own practice, which also traverses themes of power, autonomy, and euphoria. The foundation gave the Brooklyn-based artist access to the photographer’s entire oeuvre, and the resulting show, titled “Animism, Faith, Violence, and Conquest,” included a medley of Mapplethorpe’s less-charted images about utopia, resistance, and devotion. The show’s titular themes are subjects Satterwhite explored about belief systems and survival while working towards his recent Metropolitan Museum of Art commission, A Metta Prayer (2023).

A 1982-dated photograph, for example, shows a television with a chain hanging from its bottom; an image from 1985 includes a young boy in pirate costume looking through a spyglass. “I was thinking about how to subvert video games and ideas of violence, surveillance, and conquest in my project,” Satterwhite told ARTnews. He noted that he has long dreamed of doing a project around Mapplethorpe, “but if I had the chance 10 years ago, the result would have totally been different,” he said. Organizing the show fresh off his Met commission, in which he marinated similar ideas of devotion, power, and toxicity in beauty, the artist said he felt closer to Mapplethorpe’s similar concerns at this point in his practice.  

Mapplethorpe’s gallery representation itself has been important in the shifting perspectives of the artist’s work. “The dominant aesthetic of Robert’s estate, with calla lilies and nudes, was established by the foundation and Robert Miller Gallery, which initially had an exclusive representation,” Stout, the foundation president, said. The foundation changing its representation to New York’s Sean Kelly gallery in the early 2000s, helped bring forth a more multivalent approach to Mapplethorpe. In 2003, with the help of Sean Kelly, Cindy Sherman organized the first of these artist-driven curatorial projects that are now done multiple times a year.

“The public reaction and a Roberta Smith review in the New York Times convinced us that we should let other people make decisions for exhibitions,” Stout said. “Even we still see works this way that we never saw or forgot about.”

The challenge for the Mapplethorpe Foundation these days is to run an endeavor with funding from a finite repertoire. In an effort to monitor sales in various price points and avoid exhibiting the same work concurrently in separate shows, the foundation has established what they internally call “a core system.” The layout helps the board and staff break down and control the types of images sold across the globe and maintain a balanced inventory in terms of value and future demand. The works with exceptionally iconic subjects such as Patti Smith, Mapplethorpe himself, or Andy Warhol, as well as calla lilies are “for more special moments,” Stout said. This system also helps the foundation shuffle works between different gallery inventories for an even distribution.

“When we started the foundation with Robert, we weren’t sure if we would go on for over 20 years,” Stout recalled. “We don’t have trustees making emotional decisions and holding onto sentimental pieces on our board—we just want to place everything well.”

The vernissage saw a crowd of around 5,000 attendees which included largely local collectors taking an early look at 400 works mainly by African artists and artists its diasporas. Key local market heavyweights like Goodman Gallery, Stevenson, SMAC Gallery, WHATIFTHEWORLD, and Southern Guild, which will open a Los Angeles outpost later this month, showed alongside Kenya’s Circle Art, Galerie Cécile Fakhoury from Côte d’Ivoire, A.Gorgi from Tunisia, Botswana-based Ora Loapi, and Borna Soglo Gallery from Benin. Several  Italian exhibitors, such as Galleria Giovanni Bonelli, Galleria Anna Marra and Shazar Gallery, were also on hand, likely due to the fair’s Milanese owner company, Fiera Milano.

Laura Vincenti, the fair’s director, described the last decade as “a learning curve.” In that time, she has focused on bringing “galleries with content that communicates with the local scene,” she told ARTnews. “I have learned that not all galleries are prepared to show in Cape Town.”

In addition to the main gallery section, Investec also includes eight curated sections like Generations, which is new to the fair this year. (Exhibitors can participate in multiple sections.) Organized by Natasha Becker and Amogelang Maledu, Generations pairs young artists with established names to show parallels between artists’ work across decades. Johannesburg-based painter Boemo Diale, who exhibited with South African gallery Kalashnikovv Gallery, received the section’s cash prize of $80,000 South African Rand (around $4,200).

“The goal is to create fresh perspective on historical figures through the lens of contemporary artists who are in dialogue with the past,” Becker told ARTnews.

One example is placing SMAC Gallery’s presentation of Bonolo Kavula’s ephemeral geometric cutouts of shweshwe cloth adjacent to the Melrose Gallery’s booth dedicated to color-bursting paintings and sculptures by Esther Mahlangu, the grand dame of South Africa’s art scene, whose career survey at the Iziko South African National Gallery also opened this week.

Nearby, the vibrantly corporal paintings by Terence Maluleke at the Southern Guild’s booth flirt with Riaan Bolt Antiques’s group presentation dedicated to early Apartheid-era tapestry and pottery which has largely remained in European collections. Southern Guild sold all seven of Maluleke paintings which range between $5,000 and $8,600 before the end of the VIP day. “The response was extremely positive,” said Southern Guild director Jana Terblanche of the gallery’s multiple presentations at the fair, which also sold four Kamyar Bineshtarigh paintings for around $20,000 each and a timber-and-acrylic sculpture by Dominique Zinkpè for $24,000. 

In the main section, Goodman Gallery exhibited a selection of roster artists including international powerhouses like William Kentridge and Yinka Shonibare alongside Kudzanai Chiurai and Gabrielle Goliath, who will both feature in this year’s Venice Biennale. On par with the gallery’s intergenerational presentation, prices for works sold on the first day ranged broadly from $12,000 to $275,000.

Goodman is also showing in a section of the fair called “Tomorrows/Today,” which speculates on “tomorrow’s leading names,” per the fair’s description. The gallery introduces the subtly documentarian photographs of Lindokuhle Sobekwa ahead of his first institutional show at the Johannesburg Art Gallery this September.

“Sobekwa’s imagery has a delicate yet powerful quality that draws viewers into the stories he articulates. He is definitely an artist we are excited to support,” said Olivia Leahy, Goodman Gallery’s head of curatorial.

Stevenson, another established South African gallery, had in its booth a kitchen photograph by South African Pieter Hugo; a nocturnal-hued, large-scale abstraction, titled The Abundance of life (2023), by New Zealand–based Nigerian painter Ruth Iga; and Penny Siopis’s Mercy (2007), a striking drawing of a figure that leaps out of the frame into a plastic chain to spell the work’s title.

The scene-stealer in WHATIFTHEWORLD’s grouping was Chris Soal’s intricately built toothpick and concrete sculpture, Inferno, which sold for $17,100. Pierre Vermeulen’s mixed-media linen painting of faux gold leaf and sweat, Somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond, found a collector for $13,400.

Another standout at the fair comes in the Solo section, where EBONY/CURATED has a presentation dedicated to local painter Anico Mostert, who makes dreamlike oil on canvases with powdery hues. His 2023 work, From View to View, sold for $4,200 on the first day. 

One of the fair’s section with the abundant promise of discovery is ALT, which provides a platform for nontraditional commercial formats, such as curatorial collectives, nomadic spaces, advisory services, and online galleries. South African curator and adviser Anelisa Mangcu’s four-year-old initiative Under the Aegis builds a corporal tie between Dutch-Ghanaian photographer Casper Kofi’s dramatically lit images of landscapes and men, alongside Buqaqawuli Thamani Nobakada’s female protagonists painted with acrylic on lace and paper.

Church Projects’s gold-painted booth drew visitors to Durban-based photographer Alka Dass’s moody prints of men that she adorns with gentle punches of red thread and beads. Borna Soglo Gallery displayed London-based artist Tamibé Bourdanné’s photographs of Bubu Ogisi performing in Benin for a personal exploration of African masquerades that are accompanied by the plush toys donned by Ogisi in the booth’s corner.

The Investec Cape Town Art Fair continues into the weekend, with stand-out programming like a two performances by Cape Town–based artist Thania Petersen at the Bo Kaap Museum on Saturday evening, accompanied by jazz musician Hilton Schilder, Afrikaaps rapper, poet Jitsvinger, and a handful of dancers.

Opening at the tail end of a year defined by doubt and unrest, the group exhibition “World Peace” at MoCA Westport in Connecticut—co-curated by Ruth Mannes, Liz Leggett, and Todd von Ammon—took on this widely coveted, yet almost meaninglessly abstract concept. Despite the internationalism implied by the titular phrase, the show’s intergenerational roster primarily featured artists based in the US, with the works on view foregrounding an American outlook on political strife and human struggle.

Greeting viewers at the exhibition’s entrance was Tabor Robak’s MiniJumbo (2019), a scaled-down version of a stadium jumbotron screen. In place of sports game highlights, slogans like “New Addictive Substance” and “Work Harder” slide and pop across the screens in flashy fonts, the texts algorithmically generated by a neural network trained on contemporary advertising. This critique of capitalist rhetoric was accompanied by an array of works addressing militarism and war. Corita Kent’s screen-printed collage News of the Week (1969) presents a Pop-inflected take on the mass media representation of the Vietnam War, reproducing two covers from the same week’s issues of Newsweek and Time magazines in a glaring palette of red and green. Similarly employing appropriated imagery, Julia Wachtel’s painting Target (2017) juxtaposes a silkscreen print of an armed member of a Texan militia, patrolling the border in a menacing mask, with a painting of a cartoonish a balding middle-age man contemplating a toupee and girdle, drawn from a vintage greeting card. Robert Beck’s unexpectedly seductive Wound Filler (Shot #6), 2000, takes the form of a mysterious orifice, created by shooting a hole into a mass of wound filler, commonly used by morticians.

Julia Wachtel, Target, 2017, oil and acrylic ink on canvas, 60 by 76 inches; at MoCA Westport.

The exhibition’s larger second gallery was dominated by another text-based work, this one calling for action. A massive banner by the New Haven-based activist graphic design collective Class Action Collective, Vote for Science (2018) was suspended from the ceiling, dramatically spilling across the floor. The repurposed banner, reading HOPE FOR THE BEST, VOTE FOR SCIENCE in bold red and blue lettering, is one of many that the group installed on highway billboards across Connecticut, Florida, and Indiana during the 2018 midterm elections, in collaboration with the Union of Concerned Scientists. Some of the surrounding works conveyed humanity’s abominations, among them Cady Noland’s Untitled (Charles Manson), 1994, a collage of Xeroxed newspapers showing the notorious serial killer handcuffed during his trial. Others hinted at the cyclical nature of violence and injustice: the exhibition’s oldest work, a simple line drawing of a lynching on found cardboard by Bill Traylor—one of over 1,500 drawings the self-taught, Alabama-based artist made between 1939 and 1942—hung steps away from a documentary photograph by Spencer Platt depicting the arrest of a protestor in Portland during last summer’s Black Lives Matter uprisings (Female Protestor, 2020).

When I visited the show, Mannes told me that the title was inspired by a 1996 video installation by Bruce Nauman, in which five figures—one per screen—talk over one another, exchanging pleasantries (“I’ll talk, you listen” and vice versa) that ultimately turn aggressive (“If you say it once more, I’ll kill you.”). The exhibition reflected a similar skepticism about the idea of “world peace,” with the works on view highlighting atrocities, inequalities, and social fractures that can’t be simply wished away.