Museums' Joint Deal Lands Robert Mapplethorpe Archive in Los Angeles

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed)
Feb 9th 2011 at 2:01AM

The work of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe will have a new home in Los Angeles. The J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) have jointly acquired thousands of art and archival materials associated with Mapplethorpe. A release states that the vast majority of the acquisition comes in the form of a generous gift from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation while the rest was from funds provided by The David Geffen Foundation for LACMA and the J. Paul Getty Trust. The world has been rediscovering Mapplethorpe lately in the wake of the memoir "Just Kids" by rock legend Patti Smith, who recently won a National Book Award for the book which celebrates her creative and personal relationship with Mapplethorpe.

This move makes Los Angeles the center for the study of Mapplethorpe's work. The LA Times reports that the works were appraised at more than $30 million. The archives includes a print of virtually every photograph he editioned in silver gelatin, a large number of Polaroid works and unique works, artworks by Mapplethorpe's contemporaries and personal correspondence. Among the treasures is Mapplethorpe's 1978 film Still Moving featuring Patti Smith. The archive also documents the debate surrounding the homerotic nature of some of his work with media materials covering the NEA, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, and The Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center controversies that arose shortly after the artist died in 1989. Those dramatic news events were part of what has become an ongoing discussion on the role of artistic freedom in publicly funded exhibits.

The J. Paul Getty Museum and LACMA will add well over 2,000 jointly owned works of art to their collections, and a substantial archive will reside at the Getty Research Institute. LACMA and the Getty are planning a collaborative series of exhibitions and other ways to show and publish the work in the future. This is the first time that the LACMA and the Getty have acquired jointly and sets the stage for future collaborations.

The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Inc. was established by the artist in 1988, a year before his death. The foundation had two main goals, the support of medical research in the area of HIV/AIDS, and recognition of photography as art form of equal importance with painting and sculpture. The Mapplethorpe Foundation has spent millions of dollars to fund medical research in the fight against AIDS and HIV infection by establishing research and care centers at major medical facilities.

Tags: art photography, Getty museum, lacma, lifestyle, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, patti smith, RObert Mapplethorpe