Robert Mapplethorpe

Floral Park was a quiet corner of Queens, and Robert Mapplethorpe grew up there as one of six children in a Catholic household — Mass at Our Lady of the Snows, an electrical engineer for a father, a suburb he described as ordinary and confining and useful mainly as a place to leave. He studied graphic arts at Pratt Institute and left in 1969 without the degree. By then he had met Patti Smith. They lived together from 1967, took Room 1017 at the Hotel Chelsea, made work side by side and stayed close for the rest of his life — the friendship she set down in Just Kids. A curator gave him a Polaroid camera in 1971. He used it for years before moving to a medium-format camera.

The work sorts into three bodies, all of it made in the studio under controlled light. Flowers — orchids, calla lilies — shot like figures. Portraits of New York artists, writers and society figures: Warhol, Sontag, Louise Bourgeois, Philip Glass. And the male nudes and the BDSM pictures of the late 1970s, drawn from a subculture he belonged to. Between 1980 and 1983 he made more than 150 photographs of the bodybuilder Lisa Lyon. The framing is symmetrical, frontal, classical — the compositional habits of sculpture applied to what was in front of the lens.

The Perfect Moment opened at Philadelphia's Institute of Contemporary Art in December 1988, a retrospective of more than 150 pictures, the explicit portfolio in a separate age-restricted room. On June 12, 1989, three months after his death, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington cancelled it under political pressure, and a national argument followed. Senator Jesse Helms moved to bar National Endowment for the Arts money from work deemed obscene, arguing that taxpayers should not be made to subsidize what most would find indecent, and that refusing to pay is not banning. Artists and museums answered that a federal test for acceptable content is censorship by budget. In 1990 prosecutors in Cincinnati charged the Contemporary Arts Center and its director, Dennis Barrie, with pandering obscenity — the first American museum prosecuted for what it displayed. A jury acquitted both on October 5.

He was diagnosed with AIDS in 1986 and worked harder, not less — the Whitney gave him his first major American museum retrospective in 1988, and he sat for the self-portraits that show the illness. He died in a Boston hospital on March 9, 1989, at 42. His ashes are in his mother's grave in Queens. The foundation he set up the year before became his estate and has given millions to AIDS research and to photography — in 2011 it placed his archive at the Getty. The fight outlasted him: Congress attached content restrictions to arts money, most individual artist fellowships ended, and the National Endowment for the Arts never funded work again the way it did before 1989.

Robert Mapplethorpe's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Patti Smith, Horses cover portrait artwork
  The photograph on the cover of her first album 1975
• The X, Y and Z Portfolios artwork
  Three sets by subject — BDSM, flowers, male nudes — made between 1978 and 1981 1978
• Lady, Lisa Lyon artwork
  More than 150 photographs of the bodybuilder, with text by Bruce Chatwin 1983
• The Black Book artwork
  Male nudes, published with Ntozake Shange and argued over since 1986
• Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment artwork
  The 150-picture retrospective curated by Janet Kardon for the ICA in Philadelphia 1988
• Self Portrait, 1988 artwork
  Made two years after his diagnosis 1988

• 1967 aged ~21 Meets Patti Smith in New York and begins living with her She worked in bookstores and supported them both while he made objects, collages and jewelry.
• 1970 aged ~24 Moves with Smith into Room 1017 of the Hotel Chelsea
• January 1973 aged 26 First solo exhibition, Polaroids, at the Light Gallery in New York
• February 1977 aged 30 Shows portraits and erotic photographs in two separate New York spaces at once Portraits at the Holly Solomon Gallery, the erotic work at The Kitchen in SoHo.
• 1986 aged ~40 Diagnosed with AIDS and increases his output rather than cutting it
• December 1988 aged 42 The Perfect Moment opens at the ICA in Philadelphia Reviewed on formal grounds and well attended through its Philadelphia run.
• March 9, 1989 aged 42 Dies of complications from AIDS in a Boston hospital at 42
• June 12, 1989 aged 42 The Corcoran Gallery cancels the retrospective The show was to open in Washington on June 30. Its cancellation moved the argument to Congress.
• October 5, 1990 aged 43 A Cincinnati jury acquits the Contemporary Arts Center and Dennis Barrie The first obscenity prosecution of an American museum over an exhibition ended in acquittal.

• Andy Warhol 1928–1987
  Pop art pioneer whose Campbell's soup cans and celebrity portraits defined contemporary American art. photographed
• Cindy Sherman b. 1954
  Photographed herself as hundreds of other women and insisted that none of it was a self-portrait. photographed
• Richard Avedon 1923–2004
  Put movement into fashion photography, then stripped his subjects bare against white paper. fellow studio portraitist
• Diane Arbus 1923–1971
  Photographer whose square-format portraits remade American documentary photography earlier photographer of the same city
• Walker Evans 1903–1975
  Photographer of the Depression-era American South influenced