As one of the most important photographers of the twentieth century, a reputation earned by his controversial and provocative imagery, Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1989) remains best known for his portraits, stunning flowers, and explicit male nudes. But whether working with the human figure or with flowers, Mapplethorpe’s photographs are strongly formalist and he remained a studio artist. Working first with Polaroids, by the mid-seventies he shifted to a medium format Hasselblad camera. Photography proved ideal for his aesthetic, as he recalled: “But then I realized that all kinds of things can be done within the context of photography, and it was also the perfect medium, or so it seemed, for the seventies and eighties, when everything was fast.”1
The controversy caused by the 1988 traveling exhibition of his work, “Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment,” sparked a heated national discussion regarding public funding of the arts. But its notoriety has served to obscure the often poetic and exquisite beauty of many of his photographs. The artist worked in a range of techniques, and during the 1980s became interested in the possibilities of the nineteenth century printing process of photogravure.
The Solari Foundation Collection possesses a portfolio of eight photogravures by Mapplethorpe entitled A Season in Hell, dating from 1986. Inspired by an extended 1873 prose-poem—Un Saison en Enfer—by French Symbolist Arthur Rimbaud (1864–1891), Mapplethorpe captures the tortured sensibility and hallucinatory quality of the writings of its nineteenth century author. Like Mapplethorpe, Rimbaud was gay and died young. Rimbaud’s intense affair with poet Paul Verlaine, laced with hashish and absinthe, had ended violently. Loosely adopting the form of the diary of a damned soul, Rimbaud, often in a state of delirium, takes his readers on a journey through the torments of hell, declaring: “I have withered within me all human hope.”2
Mapplethorpe did not attempt to illustrate Rimbaud’s rambling stream of consciousness prose, though his images allude to its sensibility. Nor did he imitate the structure of Rimbaud’s nine-part poem (Mapplethorpe’s portfolio is comprised of eight photographs). The opening image is a cross: the artist had been raised a Roman Catholic, and although he rebelled against his religious upbringing, he acknowledged its pervasive place in his art, and some of the church’s ritualistic formality infuses his imagery. Religious themes represent a surprising undercurrent for the artist, and piety, the profane, and Satanism played conflicting important roles in much of Mapplethorpe’s work. Mapplethorpe believed churches were mysterious places and his care in arranging his subjects was comparable to the precision with which an altar was laid out, giving a structure to the sacred objects placed on it. The influence of religion on Mapplethorpe’s work was not limited to interplay with his sense of composition, and Catholicism’s core ideas may also be found in his pictures.
The second photograph in the portfolio is a close-up of a man’s face, seemingly peeling or melting from the hellish heat. Mapplethorpe follows it with an image of a hand engulfed in ethereal flames, and after that, the muscled back of a nude young man who flexes his arms. The sequence continues with a hand shooting a gun, referencing the dramatic end of Rimbaud’s relationship with Verlaine, who shot and wounded Rimbaud while drunk and was sentenced to prison. A softly focused muscular back on which a skeletal pattern is visible, poetically suggests that the journey ends in death. This image is followed by a sharply focused single rose against a background of smoke. The artist made many self-portraits, and one concludes the portfolio in the Solari Foundation Collection. It is a striking picture: Mapplethorpe gazes at the viewer, his upper torso is nude, and horns protrude from his head suggesting a devilish transformation. Its intensity conveys something of the desire that was fundamental to his life and work. As he told one interviewer, the only thing he held sacred was “Sex.”3 It references as well his sadomasochistic photographs, about which he said: “Do it for Satan.”4 That the portfolio begins with a cross and ends with a devil conveys the conflict of good and evil.
His single rose from A Season in Hell is one of the most exquisite of the series, and is an image of precision and clarity. Mapplethorpe expected his flowers “to be more than pretty,” even to “impersonate Baudelaire.”5 The majority of his still life subjects are flowers, and Janet Kardon has suggested that their symmetrical compositions reference his Catholic background (he collected crucifixes): “Because flowers are presented in a state of absolute perfection, they suggest a realm more sacred than profane.”6 The mysterious smoke that is filling the background evokes a Dantean journey through Hell, such as Rimbaud described. But in its beauty, the blossom also offers the possibility of hope. The visual tension of the crisp flower and its smoldering background conveys the conflict of good and evil that is central both to Rimbaud’s poem and Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre.
A Season in Hell dates from 1986, the year Mapplethorpe was diagnosed with AIDS, and the remainder of his life was shadowed by terminal illness. A response to his failing health, Rimbaud’s poem references the afterlife:
“O God—the clock of life stopped but a moment ago. I am no longer within the world.—Theology is accurate; Hell is certainly down below—and Heaven is up on high.—Ecstasy, nightmare, sleep, in a nest of flames.” Conscious of the fact that he was failing, the artist wryly noted: “I just hope I can live long enough to see the fame.”7
Singer Patti Smith, who had known Mapplethorpe since 1967 and was frequently photographed by him, wrote a memorial poem published the year after his death. In “A Final Flower,” she observes that Mapplethorpe “came, in time, to embrace the flower as the embodiment of all the contradictions reveling within,” finding “them to be worthy conspirators in the courting and development of conflicting emotions.” The “murky heart of the rose” could thus suggest many things.8
Cameron Kelly
Robert Mapplethorpe, Rose with Smoke, A Season In Hell (portfolio), 1986, photogravure, 12.1 x 12.1 cm, SOLARI 94.040.007L