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Loading... Mapplethorpe: A Biographyby Patricia Morrisroe
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Mapplethorpe A Biography is an absorbing book but having read recently Sam Wagstaff Before and After Mapplethorpe there is a good bit of redundancy. You will experience Mapplethorpe from his early years in Floral Park until is young death from AIDS in Manhattan. I finished the book not liking Mapplethorpe who was too self absorbed, narcissistic, self referential and simply a greedy self interested pain in the ass. Nonetheless I am glad I read the book. no reviews | add a review
The brilliant photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (1946#150;1989) was one of the most infamous figures of the contemporary art world. Patricia Morrisroe, drawing on the numerous interviews she conducted with him and those who know him, has written a remarkable biography that reveals a life even more daring than his art. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)770.92The arts Photography, computer art, cinematography, videography Photography Biography And History BiographyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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He seems also to have been a parasite, a racist, a nice guy, brutal and a relentless self-serving publicity-machine.
So, what draws people to Mapplethorpe? Is it because of his images of people, especially the sexually toned ones? His near-marriage with Patti Smith while living with her for seven years? Anything else? Probably the sex-related pictures, and the American trials for obscenity charges that followed after Mapplethorpe's death due to AIDS in 1989.
Mapplethorpe was a shining example of "niceness" until he left the military academy where his parents had sent him to become "a man".
Mapplethorpe dropped out, moved, dabbled with drugs and blew into the art world with Patti Smith, with whom he lived for seven years.
Discovering his homosexuality, which he hid from his parents for his entire life, was key. Then, interlocked with religion, pain, sex and discovering photography, everything changed. He found Sam Wagstaff, his sugar daddy and main curator, who made his career lift.
The following quote from this book seems to expose a lot about Mapplethorpe:
He seemed almost like an utter misfit version of Truman Capote: a social butterfly who used his subjects to his own benefit, not for anything else; his models often spoke of feeling used in a bad way.
Due to a highly promiscuous lifestyle without the use of condoms - and also due to Mapplethorpe's liking of coprophagy - he was often ill, and finally was hit with AIDS, which he denied having until the bitter end.
Also:
This book is the result of a massive amount of work, collected, analysed and edited over five years. The author has first and foremost interviewed Robert Mapplethorpe, and then Patti Smith, on a lot of details. This book sprawls, uncovers a lot of details - if you believe them to be true - and unveils a lot more than Smith's own book about her life with Mapplethorpe, "Just Kids".
Morrisroe has interviewed Mapplethorpe's family, friends, lovers, dealers (both in art and drugs), socialites, colleagues and fans.
At the very end of his life, Mapplethorpe mustered enough energy to see a Warhol exhibition, having outlived his former idol by a couple of years:
The last show he went to was his own, where he sold loads of his photographs. Surrounded by people he didn't know he called shots from a chair while hooked up to medical equipment, "floating on air", and then, collapsing and vomiting. That might be the final word on Mapplethorpe's persona in every single way, Patti Smith exempt.
All in all, the start of this book was a bit slow for me, a bit of dragging its heels, but then it got off to its real start, just as Mapplethorpe started to find himself during his latter teen years. It's a grand tale of a maladjusted man who wanted to live forever. Pissing nearly everybody off with everything he did must amount to something, right? ( )