Robert Mapplethorpe

Tracking echoes of antiquity in Mapplethorpe's erotic, dramatic, and exquisitely balanced black-and-white compositions.

American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–89) was an artist with a deep knowledge of art history, a sophisticated connoisseur who constantly sought to engage in dialogue with the past in order to create innovative and contemporary images. His vision was influenced by Classicism, an artistic canon that Mapplethorpe not only studied but also copied, renewed, and interpreted, translating the principles of harmony, proportion, and formal perfection that characterize classical sculpture into the medium of photography.

This volume maintains a direct dialogue between Mapplethorpe's most celebrated photographs of the perfect and eternal forms of ancient sculpture and images whose subjects are the fleeting and sensual male and female models that echo the poses or angles of the former, establishing a visual comparison between the sculptural and photographic representation of the human body.

It is from this perspective that this updated monograph sets out to trace the various stages of Mapplethorpe's career and artistic research, examining crucial phases of his production, from his early experiments with collage to his latest works, including his iconic photographs of nudes, portraits, and floral compositions.