Museums' Joint Deal Lands Robert Mapplethorpe Archive in Los Angeles
Filed under: Art
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.
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