Robert Mapplethorpe
(1946 - 1989) |
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Art Work
| Name: |
Robert Mapplethorpe |
| Gender: |
Male |
| Place of Birth: |
Floral Park, New York, USA |
| Nationality: |
American |
| Birth: |
1946 |
| Death: |
1989 |
| Website: |
http://www.mapplethorpe.org/ |
| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
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| Medium: |
gelatin-silver print, mixed medium |
| Method: |
Photography |
| Style: |
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| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Photographer
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Biography
Mapplethorpe was born and grew up as a Roman Catholic of English and Irish heritage in Our Lady of the Snows Parish in Floral Park, Queens, New York. He received a B.F.A. from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he majored in graphic arts.
Mapplethorpe took his first photographs soon thereafter using a Polaroid camera. In the mid-1970s, he acquired a Hasselblad medium-format camera and began taking photographs of a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, including artists, composers, and socialites. In the 1980s he refined his aesthetic, photographing statuesque male and female nudes, delicate flower still lifes, and highly formal portraits of artists and celebrities. Mapplethorpe's first studio was at 24 Bond Street in Manhattan. In the 1980s Sam Wagstaff gave him $500,000 to buy the top-floor loft at 35 West 23rd Street, where he lived and had his shooting space. He kept the Bond Street loft as his darkroom.
Mapplethorpe died on the morning of March 9, 1989, in a Boston, Massachusetts's hospital from complications arising from AIDS; he was 42 years old. His ashes were buried in Queens, New York, in his mother's grave, marked 'Maxey'.
Nearly a year before his death, the ailing Mapplethorpe helped found the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Inc. His vision for the Foundation was that it would be "the appropriate vehicle to protect his work, to advance his creative vision, and to promote the causes he cared about".
Since his death, the Foundation has not only functioned as his official estate and helped promote his work throughout the world, it has also raised and donated millions of dollars to fund medical research in the fight against AIDS and HIV infection.
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Samples of Work
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