ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE

PHOTOGRAPHER

Opposition to Mapplethorpe's work, much of it erotic, by such dictatorial conservatives as Reverend Donald E. Wildmon, of the American Family Association, and Senators Alfonse D'Amato (New York) and Jesse Helms (North Carolina) publicized his name widely and drove up the value of his photographs.

Robert Mapplethorpe was born in New York City, November 4, 1946 and trained as a painter and sculptor at the Pratt Institute (1963-1970). He became famous as a photographer in the middle 1970s with exhibitions of his portraits, intensely beautiful flower pictures, and nude studies. He photographed nude women, but his most compelling and controversial works showed exposed male sex organs and black and white nude men together, sometimes performing acts of sadomasochism.

In 1989, fearing protests by political conservatives, the curator of the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., cancelled a show of Mapplethorpe's work. This precipitated a huge controversy about the nature of art which played into the hands of Senator Helms, who succeeded in getting the Senate to curtail National Endowment of the Arts grants to support "obscene or indecent art" (such as Mapplethorpe's). When the Mapplethorpe exhibition opened at Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center in 1990, the Center and its director were charged with obscenity. Both were later acquitted.

Mapplethorpe did not witness these battles. He had died of AIDS on March 9, 1989. In December 1992 his estate presented the Guggenheim Museum in New York with a gift that consisted of $2 million in cash and artwork by Mapplethorpe valued at $3 million. Next Card 32: BELINDA MASON: Journalist, AIDS Activist

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