Robert Mapplethorpe: Almodóvar's Gaze

Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Photography & Video

Robert Mapplethorpe: Almodóvar's Gaze Details

Taking as its point of departure the meeting of two artists at a tumultuous moment in the 1980s, Almodovar’s Gaze explores how the photographic and filmmaking lens can fruitfully overlap. American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1989) and Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar (born 1949) first met in Madrid in 1984, when the photographer was there on a visit occasioned by his first exhibition in the city. Mapplethorpe was already an accomplished artist, 38 years old and sure of himself and his sensibility. Pedro Almodóvar was a well-known filmmaker in the Spanish underground, and the best-known international representative of the Madrid–based countercultural Movida movement that arose after General Franco’s death in 1975. Mapplethorpe and Almodóvar had gone out partying in Madrid, which at the time was particularly receptive to young artists closer to the underground than to the establishment. The later impact that Mapplethorpe’s retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art had on Almodóvar in 1987 was tremendous. This intimate arrangement of Mapplethorpe’s seductive and powerful images was carefully selected by Almodóvar from over 1,700 of Mapplethorpe’s photographs.

Reviews

The works of Robert Mapplethorpe have been the focal points of many books and many exhibitions since his untimely death due to AIDS in 1989 at the age of 43. His influence has been felt by almost all who engage in art and in writing. This beautifully designed book is unique in that it represents a collection of Mapplethorpe's oeuvre as selected by the brilliant filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar for an exhibition in Madrid, Spain in 2011. Though Almodóvar selected the photographs to be included he did not wish to be known as the curator of the exhibition. The words explaining the filmmaker's choices and responses to the artist's work are those of the American brilliant writer Siri Hustvedt.Throughout this excellent book, reproducing the images of Mapplethorpe and arranged in a sophisticated manner, Siri Hustvedt offers an introduction and then comments on Almodóvar's selection of prints, adding her own knowledgeable thoughts on the works of Mapplethorpe and his place in the history of art. At times a printed page (in both Spanish and English) opposite one carefully reproduced photograph will be a simple statement, such as `May I say that Almodóvar is dense and complex, that his art is about proliferation, while Mapplethorpe reduces and simplifies? Is this accurate?' On another page she states, `Penises in Greek were always modestly sized. Mapplethorpe's images of penises are large, much larger than would have been deemed beautiful among the Greeks. They abhorred anything that suggested the monstrous.'Toward the end of this 2012 book Hustvedt writes eloquently about the junction between the two artists: `The most important photo to the logic of the exhibition is the first one - Mapplethorpe's mask-like self-portrait that reveals only his eyes. The rest of the face is missing. What counts, after all, in what is to follow is a personal vision, the way the artist sees. It's a photograph about voyeurism, and all photographers and filmmakers are voyeurs, aren't they? They direct their cameras at real people and things, but what appears in their art is an imaginary reality, a product not only of what is there in front of them, but of their dreams and fantasies and wishes. This is where the two artists overlap - in the drama of seeing.'This is a brilliant book on every level - content, production, history, art. It deserves wide attention. Grady Harp, February 13

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