![]() The gallery includes paintings Mapplethorpe made as a student at New York’s Pratt Institute as well as a three-dimensional wall piece and a freestanding installation. He was clearly wrestling with his Catholicism, transforming its shrines, iconography, and stations of the cross into a language of his own travail. This phase of the exhibition draws on the Mapplethorpe archive, showing what his art was like before he took up photography. ![]() It’s always little altars.” The gallery takes viewers back in time to the late 1960s and early ‘70s, when Mapplethorpe was still a somewhat callow lad whose identity was in transition. A church has a certain magic and mystery for a child. Its introductory text begins with the following quotation from Mapplethorpe: “I was a Catholic boy. The freestanding wall divides the large first gallery into two smaller ones, the second of which is very different from the first. It’s puzzling that the man in chains is seated in an old-fashioned wing chair on an oriental rug, as if the composition were of a man and his wife in a typical middle-class home of the 1950s-the sort of home in which Mapplethorpe grew up. One man stands beside the other, holding chains attached to his partner’s ankles, wrists, and neck. But to the right, Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter (1992), also in black leather, make a more confusing composition. He’s in a black leather jacket with a cigarette dangling from his mouth and a shock of hair combed forward in the style favored by greasers and bikers. At the center is a 1980 Mapplethorpe self-portrait that’s all attitude. A wall facing the entrance groups photographs of men in black leather. The first gallery of the LACMA exhibition acknowledges the gay community in which Mapplethorpe immersed himself. But the exhibition design gives visitors a chance to see how Mapplethorpe’s sensibility as an artist progressed to that point. ![]() It has a gallery mostly to itself at LACMA. Among the bodies of work that came to LACMA was the “X Portfolio,” Mapplethorpe’s study of sadomasochistic homosexual lovers that caused all the controversy. These shows benefit from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation’s large donations of artwork, along with a significant amount of archival material, to both LACMA and the Getty Center’s Research Institute as well as the Getty Museum. ![]() But these two exhibitions-especially LACMA’s-do a great deal to humanize him in ways earlier exhibitions couldn’t. Even 27 years after his death from AIDS, to many people, Mapplethorpe is still the demonic figure North Carolina senator Jesse Helms made him out to be. Paul Getty Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art ( LACMA), manage to give us a new perspective on Mapplethorpe as both an artist and a human being. Yet two new exhibitions in Los Angeles, at the J. ![]()
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