You know, ‘Devil’s Horns From the Party Store Down the Road,’ it’s funny! It’s not as if you can’t be a serious artist and hilarious at the same time.” “And at the same time, he would make pictures that were funny. Rather than paint him as a one-note provocateur, though, the filmmakers manage to capture the many sides to the man. “Yes, of course he wanted to be this serious artist and, yes, he was deadly earnest about his art,” Bailey says. They’re all currently on view in a major joint retrospective exhibition, The Perfect Medium, taking place at the Getty Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through the summer. Those photos include the X portfolio, a set of 13 formally impeccable black-and-white photographs that document the gay BDSM scene of Seventies New York City and Black Book, that eroticized the black male body, as well as the portraits of celebrities (Carolina Herrera, Brooke Shields), models and muses, such the iconic “Ken Moody and Robert Sherman,” that features the two men with alopecia - one black, one white - in profile. “From the humor in it and explicitness, to the volume of artwork that we show - because we feature almost 500 images of his art - that we’re almost shocked that it’s going to be shown anywhere because it’s so explicit! We feel like a golden shower or a fist fucking image deserves a Ken Burns treatment.” “We took all our cues in making this film from Robert,” Barbato tells Rolling Stone. That protest turned out to solidify the artist’s legend, and the documentary continues to burnish his reputation. The film begins with the voice of Senator Jesse Helms exhorting everyone to, “Look at the pictures!” He was protesting an exhibit of Mapplethorpe’s work that he viewed as pornographic, and we see the conservative politician waving what he viewed as smut, seeking to inflame the culture wars, despite the fact that Mapplethorpe had died just a few months prior at the age of 42 of AIDS. The Beatles in India: 16 Things You Didn't Know Even more than the aesthetic merits of the photographs, however, is the narrative of striving that transformed Mapplethorpe from a fringe photographer into one of the most collectable artists of the last half of the 20th century. His early self-portrait in which he looks at the camera with a bullwhip for a tail can be seen as a taunt and a promise of his power. Directed by Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey - the producers of RuPaul’s Drag Race who have also examined oddballs and outliers in documentaries such as Party Monster, The Eyes of Tammy Faye and Inside Deep Throat - the film allows us to linger on many of those sensational images of men in states of agony and arousal, blurring gender and sexuality that continue to provoke with their questions about what can be beautiful and what can be art. He was the outcast who took drugs and dressed weird, until he found his path to stardom. That ambition shines through in the new HBO documentary, Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures.
Growing up in 1950s Queens, New York, he escaped to art school in Brooklyn, searching for a way to transform himself. Robert Mapplethorpe decided he was an important artist long before he was even making important art.