Handsigned below the photo by Robert Mapplethorpe in blue pen. Back has manu written by the owners of Chanterelle Restaurant IN New York City
Robert Michael Mapplethorpe (/ˈmeɪpəlˌθɔːrp/; November 4, 1946 – March 9, 1989) was an American photographer, best known for his black-and-white photographs. His work featured an array of subjects, including celebrity portraits, male and female nudes, self-portraits, and still-life images. His most controversial works documented and examined the homosexual male BDSM subculture of New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A 1989 exhibition of Mapplethorpe's work, titled Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment, sparked a debate in the United States concerning both use of public funds for "obscene" artwork and the Constitutional limits of free speech in the United States.
Contents
1 Biography
1.1 Death
1.2 Foundation
2 Art
3 Controversy
3.1 The Perfect Moment (1989 solo exhibit tour)
3.2 University of Central England incident
3.3 The Black Book
4 Posthumously
4.1 Art market
5 Selected publications
6 Selected exhibitions
7 See also
8 References
9 Further reading
10 External links
Biography
Mapplethorpe was born in Floral Park, Queens, New York City, the son of Joan Dorothy (Maxey) and Harry Irving Mapplethorpe, an electrical engineer.[1] He was of English, Irish, and German descent, and grew up as a Catholic in Our Lady of the Snows Parish. He had three brothers and two sisters.[2] One of his brothers, Edward, later worked for him as assistant and became a photographer as well.[3] He studied for a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he majored in Graphic Arts,[4] though he dropped out in 1969 before finishing his degree.[5] Mapplethorpe lived with his girlfriend Patti Smith from 1967 to 1972,[6] and she supported him[7] by working in bookstores.[8] They created art together,[9] and maintained a close friendship throughout Mapplethorpe's life.[8][10][11]
Mapplethorpe's studio at 24 Bond Street in Manhattan, later kept by him for use as a darkroom
Mapplethorpe took his first photographs in the late 1960s or early 1970s using a Polaroid camera. In 1972, he met art curator Sam Wagstaff, who would become his mentor, lover,[12] patron, and lifetime companion.[13] In the mid-1970s, Wagstaff acquired a Hasselblad medium-format camera and Mapplethorpe began taking photographs of a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, including artists, composers, and socialites. During this time, he became friends with New Orleans artist George Dureau, whose work had such a profound impact on Mapplethorpe that he restaged many of Dureau's early photographs. From 1977 until 1980, Mapplethorpe was the lover of writer and Drummer editor Jack Fritscher,[14] who introduced him to the Mineshaft (a members-only BDSM gay leather bar and sex club in Manhattan).[15] Mapplethorpe took many pictures of the Mineshaft and was at one point its official photographer (... "After dinner I go to the Mineshaft."[16][17][18])
By the 1980s, Mapplethorpe's subject matter focused on 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, Wagstaff bought a top-floor loft at 35 West 23rd Street for Robert, where he resided, also using it as a photo-shoot studio.[19] He kept the Bond Street loft as his darkroom. In 1988, Mapplethorpe selected Patricia Morrisroe to write his biography, which was based on more than 300 interviews with celebrities, critics, lovers, and Mapplethorpe himself.[19]
Death
Mapplethorpe died on the morning of March 9, 1989 at the age of 42 due to complications from HIV/AIDS, in a Boston, Massachusetts hospital. His body was cremated. His ashes are interred at St. John's Cemetery, Queens in New York City, at his mother's grave-site, etched "Maxey".[20]
Foundation
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".[21] Since his death, the Foundation has not only functioned as his official estate and helped promote his work throughout the world, but has also raised and donated millions of dollars to fund medical research in the fight against AIDS and HIV infection. The Foundation donated $1 million towards the 1993 establishment of the Robert Mapplethorpe Residence, a six-story townhouse for long-term residential AIDS treatment on East 17th Street in New York City, in partnership with Beth Israel Medical Center.[22] (The residence closed in 2015 citing financial difficulties.[23])The Foundation also promotes fine art photography at the institutional level.[21] The Foundation helps determines which galleries represent Mapplethorpe's art.[24][25] In 2011, the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation donated the Robert Mapplethorpe Archive, spanning from 1970 to 1989, to the Getty Research Institute.[26]
Art
Mapplethorpe worked primarily in a studio, and almost exclusively in black and white, with the exception of some of his later work and his final exhibit "New Colors". His body of work features a wide range of subjects. He exhibited a great mastery on “how to appreciate a little difference between dark gray and the next brighter gray like a passionate listener can appreciate the difference between ppp, pp, p, mf f ff fff." Luis Alberto Mejia Clavijo.[27], and the greater part of his work is on erotic imagery. He would refer to some of his own work as pornographic,[19] with the aim of arousing the viewer, but which could also be regarded as high art.[28] His erotic art explored a wide range of sexual subjects, depicting the BDSM subculture of New York in the 1970s, portrayals of black male nudes, and classical nudes of female bodybuilders. Mapplethorpe was a participant observer for much of his erotic photography, participating in the sexual acts which he was photographing and engaging his models sexually.[28]
Other subjects included flowers, especially orchids and calla lilies, children, statues, and celebrities and other artists, including Andy Warhol, Louise Bourgeois, Deborah Harry, Kathy Acker, Richard Gere, Peter Gabriel, Grace Jones, Amanda Lear, Laurie Anderson, Iggy Pop, Philip Glass, David Hockney, Cindy Sherman, Joan Armatrading, and Patti Smith. Smith was a longtime roommate of Mapplethorpe and a frequent subject in his photography, including a stark, iconic photograph that appears on the cover of Smith's first album, Horses.[29] His work often made reference to religious or classical imagery, such as a 1975 portrait of Patti Smith [30] from 1986 which recalls Albrecht Dürer's 1500 self-portrait. Between 1980 and 1983, Mapplethorpe created over 150 photographs of bodybuilder Lisa Lyon, culminating in the 1983 photobook Lady, Lisa Lyon, published by Viking Press and with text by Bruce Chatwin.
Robert took areas of dark human consent and made them into art. He worked without apology, investing the homosexual with grandeur, masculinity, and enviable nobility. Without affectation, he created a presence that was wholly male without sacrificing feminine grace. He was not looking to make a political statement or an announcement of his evolving sexual persuasion. He was presenting something new, something not seen or explored as he saw and explored it. Robert sought to elevate aspects of male experience, to imbue homosexuality with mysticism. As Cocteau said of a Genet poem, "His obscenity is never obscene."
— Patti Smith, Just Kids[31]
Controversy
The Perfect Moment (1989 solo exhibit tour)
In the summer of 1989, a traveling solo exhibit by Mapplethorpe brought national attention to the issues of public funding for the arts, as well as questions of censorship and the obscene. The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., had agreed to be one of the host museums for the tour. Mapplethorpe decided to show his latest series that he explored shortly before his death. Titled Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment, the show included photographs from his X Portfolio, which featured images of urophagia, gay BDSM and a self-portrait with a bullwhip inserted in his anus.[32] It also featured photos of two children with exposed genitals.[33][34] The show was curated by Janet Kardon of the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA).[35][36] The ICA was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support Mapplethorpe's exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. The Corcoran cancelled the show, terminating its contract with the ICA, because it did not want to get involved in the political issues which it raised, but instead the gallery was pulled into the controversy, which "intensified the debate waged both in the media and in Congress surrounding the NEA's funding of projects perceived by some individuals ... to be inappropriate ..."[37] The hierarchy of the Corcoran and several members of the U.S. Congress were upset when the works were revealed to them, due to the homoerotic and sadomasochistic themes of some of the work. Though much of his work throughout his career had been regularly displayed in publicly funded exhibitions, conservative and religious organizations such as the American Family Association seized on this exhibition to vocally oppose government support for what they called "nothing more than the sensational presentation of potentially obscene material."[38]
In June 1989, pop artist Lowell Blair Nesbitt became involved in the censorship issue. Nesbitt, a long-time friend of Mapplethorpe, revealed that he had a $1.5-million bequest to the museum in his will, but publicly promised that if the museum refused to host the exhibition, he would revoke the bequest. The Corcoran refused and Nesbitt bequeathed the money to the Phillips Collection instead. After the Corcoran refused the Mapplethorpe exhibition, the underwriters of the exhibition went to the nonprofit Washington Project for the Arts,[39] which showed all the images in its space from July 21 to August 13, 1989, to large crowds.[40][41] In 1990, the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, which had also showed the exhibit, and Dennis Barrie, were charged with obscenity; photographs that depicted men in sadomasochistic poses were the basis of charges that the museum and its director had pandered obscenity. They were found not guilty by a jury.[42]
According to the ICA, "The Corcoran's decision sparked a controversial national debate: Should tax dollars support the arts? Who decides what is "obscene" or "offensive" in public exhibitions? And if art can be considered a form of free speech, is it a violation of the First Amendment to revoke federal funding on grounds of obscenity? To this day, these questions remain very much at issue."[35][43] Mapplethorpe became something of a cause célèbre for both sides of the American culture war. However, prices for many of the Mapplethorpe photographs doubled and even tripled as a consequence of all the attention. The artist's notoriety supposedly also helped the posthumous sale at Christie's auction house of Mapplethorpe's own collection of furniture, pottery, silver and works by other artists, which brought about $8 million.[44]
University of Central England incident
In 1998, the University of Central England was involved in a controversy when a library book by Mapplethorpe was confiscated. A final-year undergraduate student was writing a paper on the work of Robert Mapplethorpe and intended to illustrate the paper with a few photographs from Mapplethorpe, a book of the photographer's work. She took the photographs to the local chemist to be developed and the chemist informed West Midlands Police because of the unusual nature of the images. The police confiscated the library book from the student and informed the university that two photographs in the book would have to be removed. If the university agreed to the removal (which it did not) the book would be returned. The two photographs, which were deemed possibly prosecutable as obscenity, were “Helmut and Brooks, NYC, 1978”, which shows anal fisting, and “Jim and Tom, Sausalito, 1977”, which is of a man clad in a dog collar, a leather mask and trousers, urinating into another man's mouth.”[45][46][47] After a delay of about six months, the affair came to an end when Peter Knight, the Vice-Chancellor of the university, was informed that no legal action would be taken. [46][47] The book was returned to the university library without removal of the photos.[48]
The Black Book
The 1986 solo exhibition "Black Males" and the subsequent book The Black Book sparked controversy for their depiction of black men. The images, erotic depictions of black men, were widely criticized for being exploitative.[49][50][51] The work was largely phallocentric and sculptural, focusing on segments of the subject's bodies. His purported intention with these photographs and the use of black men as models was the pursuit of the Platonic ideal.[19] Mapplethorpe's initial interest in the black male form was inspired by films like Mandingo and the interrogation scene in Cruising, in which an unknown black character enters the interrogation room and slaps the protagonist across the face.[52]
Criticism was the subject of a work by American conceptual artist Glenn Ligon, Notes on the Margins of the Black Book (1991–1993). Ligon juxtaposes Mapplethorpe's 91 images of black men in the 1988 publication Black Book with critical texts and personal reactions about the work to complicate the racial undertones of the imagery.[53]
American poet and activist Essex Hemphill also expressed criticism in his anthology Brother to Brother (1991). Although he believed that Mapplethorpe's work reflected exceptional talent, Hemphill also believed that it displayed a lack of concern for black individuals in the gay community, "except as sexual subjects".[54]
Posthumously
In 1992, author Paul Russell dedicated his novel Boys of Life to Mapplethorpe, as well as to Karl Keller and Pier Paolo Pasolini.[55]
When Mapplethorpe: A Biography by Patricia Morrisroe was published by Random House in 1995,[19] the Washington Post Book World described it as "Mesmerizing ... Morrisroe has succeeded in re-creating the photographer's world of light and dark."[56] Art critic Arthur C. Danto, writing in The Nation, praised it as "utterly admirable ... The clarity and honesty of Morrisroe's portrait are worthy of its subject."[57]
In 1996, Patti Smith wrote a book The Coral Sea dedicated to Mapplethorpe.[58]
Philips released a photo disc for their CD-i video game system in 1992 called The Flowers of Robert Mapplethorpe.[59]
In September 1999, Arena Editions published Pictures, a monograph that reintroduced Mapplethorpe's sex pictures. In 2000, Pictures was seized by two South Australian plain-clothes detectives from an Adelaide bookshop in the belief that the book breached indecency and obscenity laws.[60] Police sent the book to the Canberra-based Office of Film and Literature Classification after the state Attorney-General's Department deftly decided not to get involved in the mounting publicity storm. Eventually, the OFLC board agreed unanimously that the book, imported from the United States, should remain freely available and unrestricted.[61]
In May 2007, American writer, director, and producer James Crump directed the documentary film Black White + Gray, which premiered at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival. It explores the influence Mapplethorpe, curator Sam Wagstaff, and musician/poet Patti Smith had on the 1970s art scene in New York City.[62][63][64][65][66]
In September 2007, Prestel published Mapplethorpe: Polaroids, a collection of 183 of approximately 1,500 existing Mapplethorpe polaroids.[67] This book accompanies an exhibition by the Whitney Museum of American Art in May 2008.
In 2008, Robert Mapplethorpe was named by Equality Forum as one of their 31 Icons of the 2015 LGBT History Month.[68]
Patti Smith's 2010 memoir Just Kids focuses on her relationship with Mapplethorpe.[69] The book won the 2010 National Book Award for Nonfiction.[70]
In June 2016, Belgian fashion designer Raf Simons debuted his men's Spring 2017 collection inspired by Mapplethorpe's work and featuring several of his photographs printed onto shirts, jackets, and smocks.[71][72]
The American documentary film, Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, was released in 2016. It was directed and executive produced by Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey, and produced by Katharina Otto-Bernstein.[73][74][75][76][77][78]
In January 2016, filmmaker Ondi Timoner announced that she was directing a feature about him, Mapplethorpe, with Matt Smith in the lead role.[79] The film premiered on April 22, 2018 at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City.[80]
In 2019 and 2020, the Guggenheim Museum in New York City is hosting Implicit Tensions, an exhibition of many of Mapplethorpe's works.[81]
Art market
In 2017, a 1987 Mapplethorpe self-portrait platinum print was auctioned for £450,000,[82] making it the most expensive Mapplethorpe photograph ever sold.
Selected publications
Hollinghurst, Alan; Morgan, Stuart (1983). Robert Mapplethorpe: 1970–1983. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts. ISBN 0-905263-31-6.
Mapplethorpe, Robert; Chatwin, Bruce (1983). Lady, Lisa Lyon. New York: Viking Press. ISBN 0-670-43012-9.
Mapplethorpe, Robert (1985). Certain People: A Book of Portraits. Pasadena, CA: Twelvetrees Press. ISBN 0-942642-14-7.
Mapplethorpe, Robert; Shange, Ntozake (1986). Black Book. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-08302-5.
Marshall, Richard; Mapplethorpe, Robert (1986). 50 New York Artists: A Critical Selection of Painters and Sculptors Working in New York. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. ISBN 0-87701-403-5.
Robert Mapplethorpe. Tokyo: Parco. 1987. ISBN 4-89194-149-9.
Mapplethorpe Portraits. London: National Portrait Gallery. 1988. ISBN 0-904017-91-5.
Mapplethorpe, Robert; Didion, Joan (1989). Some Women. Boston: Bulfinch Press. ISBN 0-8212-1716-X.
Kardon, Janet; Joselit, David; Larson, Kay (1988). Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment. Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. ISBN 0-88454-046-4.
Mapplethorpe, Robert (1990). Flowers. Boston: Bulfinch Press. ISBN 0-8212-1781-X.
Cheim, John (1991). Early Works 1970–1974. New York: Robert Miller Gallery. ISBN 0-944680-36-4.
Celant, Germano (1992). Mapplethorpe. Milan: Electa/Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. ISBN 88-435-3647-8.
Mapplethorpe, Robert; Danto, Arthur Coleman (1992). Mapplethorpe. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-679-40804-5.
White, Edmund (1995). Altars. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-679-42721-X.
Ashbery, John; Holborn, Mark; Levas, Dimitri (1996). Pistils. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-679-40805-3.
Rimbaud, Arthur; Schmidt, Paul; Mapplethorpe, Robert (1997). A Season in Hell. Boston: Little, Brown. ISBN 0-8212-2458-1.
Levas, Dimitri; Sischy, Ingrid (1999). Pictures. Arena Editions. ISBN 1-892041-16-2.
Celant, Germano; Ippolitov, Arkadiĭ; Vail, Karole P B; Blessing, Jennifer (2004). Robert Mapplethorpe and the Classical Tradition: Photographs and Mannerist Prints. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. ISBN 0-89207-312-8.
Celant, Germano (2005). Robert Mapplethorpe: Tra Antico e Moderno. Un'antologia. Turin, Italy: Palazzina della Promotrice delle Belle Arti. ISBN 88-7624-610-X.
Mapplethorpe, Robert (2006). The Complete Flowers. Essay by Herbert Muschamp. New York: teNeues. ISBN 3-8327-9168-X.
Wolf, Sylvia (2007). Polaroids: Mapplethorpe. Munich and New York: Prestel. ISBN 978-3-7913-3835-4.
Robert Mapplethorpe X7. Interviews by Richard Flood. New York: teNeues Publishing. 2011. ISBN 978-3-8327-9473-6.
Neutres, Jerome; Smith, Patti; White, Edmund; Pinet, Helene; Benhamou-Huet, Judith (2014). Robert Mapplethorpe. Paris: Éditions de la Reunion des Musées Nationaux – Grand Palais. ISBN 9782711861408.
Holborn, Mark, ed. (2016). Mapplethorpe Flora: The Complete Flowers. Essay by Dimitri Levas. New York: Phaidon. ISBN 978-0-7148-7131-8.
Martineau, Paul; Salvesen, Britt (2016). Robert Mapplethorpe: The Photographs. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum. ISBN 978-1-60606-469-6.
Selected exhibitions
This section may be too long to read and navigate comfortably. Please consider splitting content into sub-articles, condensing it, or adding subheadings. (January 2020)
1973: Polaroids, Light Gallery, New York.[83]
1977:
Flowers, Holly Solomon Gallery, New York.[83]
Erotic Pictures, The Kitchen, New York.[83]
Portraits, Holly Solomon Gallery, New York.[83]
1978:
The Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, VA. Catalogue with text by Mario Amaya.[84]
Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA.[84]
1983
Lady, Lisa Lyon, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York[83]
Robert Mapplethorpe, Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, Paris.[83]
Robert Mapplethorpe, 1970–1983, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. Traveled to Stills, Edinburgh; Arnolfini, Bristol; Midland Group, Nottingham; and Museum of Modern Art, Oxford. Catalogue with text by Stuart Morgan and Alan Hollinghurst.[83]
Robert Mapplethorpe, Fotografie, Centro di Documentazione di Palazzo Fortuny, Venice. Traveled to Palazzo Delle Cento Finestre, Florence (1984). Catalogue with text by Germano Celant.
1987:
Robert Mapplethorpe 1986, Raab Galerie, Berlin; Kicken-Pauseback Galerie, Cologne. Catalogue with interview by Anne Horton.[83]
Robert Mapplethorpe, Obalne galerije, Piran, Ljubljana, Yugoslavia. Catalogue with text by Germano Celant.[83]
1988:
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York[84]
Robert Mapplethorpe, the Perfect Moment, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Traveled to Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Washington Project for the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; University Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio; and Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Catalogue with text by Janet Kardon, David Joselit, Kay Larson, and Patti Smith.[84]
1992:
Robert Mapplethorpe, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark; Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Turin, Italy (1992); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1992); Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Prato, Italy (1993); Residence of Embassador Negroponte, Manila, Philippines (1993); Museo Pecci Prato, Prato, Italy (1993); Turun Taidemuseo, Turku, Finland (1993); Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels (1993); Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv (1994); Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (1994); KunstHaus, Wien, Vienna (1994); Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (1995); Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth (1995); City Gallery Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand (1995); Hayward Gallery, London (1996); Gallery of Photography, Dublin (1996); Museo de Art Moderna, São Paulo(1997); Staatdgalerie, Stuttgart (1997). Catalogue with text by Germano Celant.[85]
Robert Mapplethorpe, Tokyo Teien Museum, Tokyo. Curated by Toshio Shimizu. Traveled to ATM Contemporary Art Gallery, Mito, Japan; The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura, Japan; Nagoya City Art Museum, Nagoya, Japan; The Museum of Modern Art, Shiga, Japan.[86]
1996:
Les Autoportraits de Mapplethorpe, Galerie Baudoin Lebon, Paris.[87]
1997: Robert Mapplethorpe, Mitsukoshi Museum of Art, Shinjuku, Japan. Curated by Richard D. Marshall, Noriko Fuku, and Hiroaki Hayakawa. Traveled to Takashimaya "Grand Hall", Osaka; Fukushima Prefectural Museum of Art, Fukishima; Hokkaido Asahikawa Museum of Art, Asahikawa; Sogo Museum of Art, Yokohama; Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, Kagawa.[84]
1999: Robert Mapplethorpe, Centre Cultural La Beneficencia, Valencia, Spain.[84]
2002: Robert Mapplethorpe Retrospective, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sapporo, Japan. Curated by Toshio Shimizu.[85]
2003: Eye to Eye, Sean Kelly Gallery, New York. Curated by Cindy Sherman.
2004: Pictures, Pictures, Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles. Curated by Catherine Opie.[88]
2005:
Robert Mapplethorpe and the Classical Tradition: Photographs and Mannerist Prints, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Traveled to Deutsche Guggenheim Museum, Berlin; The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg (2005); Moscow House of Photography, Moscow (2005); The Guggenheim Hermitage Museum, Las Vegas (2006–2007).[89]
Robert Mapplethorpe, Alison Jacques Gallery, London. Curated by David Hockney.[84]
Robert Mapplethorpe, Galeria Fortes Vilaca, São Paulo. Curated by Vik Muniz.[90]
Robert Mapplethorpe: Tra Antico e Moderno. Un'antologia, Palazzina della Promotrice delle Belle Arti, Turin, Italy. Curated by Germano Celant.[91]
2006: Robert Mapplethorpe, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg. Curated by Robert Wilson.[92]
2008: Mapplethorpe: Polaroids, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.[93] Traveled to: Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art, Chicago (2009);[94] Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2009).[95]
2009:
Sterling Ruby & Robert Mapplethorpe, Xavier Hufkens Gallery, Brussels.[96]
Robert Mapplethorpe: Perfection in Form, Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence. Traveled to: Museo de Arte, Lugano (2010).[97]
Artist Rooms Tour: Robert Mapplethorpe, Organized by the Tate/ National Galleries of Scotland/Art Fund, Inverness Museum and Art Gallery, Inverness-shire, UK. 2009. Traveled to: Museums Sheffield, Sheffield, UK (2009); Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, UK (2010).[98]
2010: Robert Mapplethorpe, NRW-Forum Kultur Wirtschaft, Düsseldorf. Traveled to: C/O Berlin, Berlin (2011); Fotografiska, Stockholm (2011); Forma Foundation for Photography, Milan (2011); Ludwig Museum, Budapest (2012).[99]
2011:
Robert Mapplethorpe curated by Pedro Almodóvar, Galeria Elvira Gonzalez, Madrid.[100]
Robert Mapplethorpe: Curated by Sofia Coppola, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris.[101]
Robert Mapplethorpe, Onassis Cultural Centre, Athens, Greece.[102]
2012:
Artist Rooms Scottish Tour: Robert Mapplethorpe, Dunoon Burgh Hall, Dunoon, UK. Traveled to: The Gallery at Linlithgow Burgh Halls, Linlithgow, UK, Perth Museum & Art Gallery, Perth, UK (2012), Old Gala House, Galashiels, UK (2013).[103]
Robert Mapplethorpe: XYZ, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles.[104]
In Focus: Robert Mapplethorpe, J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center, Los Angeles.[105]
2014:
Robert Mapplethorpe, Grand Palais, Paris.[106] Traveled to: Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki (2015).[107]
Robert Mapplethorpe: Photographs from the Kinsey Institute Collection, Kinsey Institute, Bloomington, Indiana.[108]
2015: Warhol & Mapplethorpe: Guise & Dolls, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford.[109]
2016:
Mapplethorpe + Munch, The Munch Museum, Oslo.[110]
Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.[111][112] Traveled to: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal,[113] Kunsthal Rotterdam, Rotterdam,[114] Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2017).[115]
Robert Mapplethorpe: On the Edge, ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Aarhus, Denmark.[116]
Teller on Mapplethorpe, Alison Jacques Gallery, London.[117]
2017:
Robert Mapplethorpe, Xavier Hufkens, Brussels.[118]
Robert Mapplethorpe, a perfectionist, Kunsthal, Rotterdam, Holland.[119]
Memento Mori: Robert Mapplethorpe Photographs from the Peter Marino Collection, Chanel Nexus Hall, Tokyo. Traveled to: Kyotographie 2017, Kyoto.[120]
Dangerous Art: Queer Show. Haifa Museum of Art. Curated by Svetlana Reingold.[121]
2018:
Robert Mapplethorpe, Gladstone Gallery, New York. Curated by Roe Ethridge.[83]
Robert Mapplethorpe: Pictures, Serralves Foundation, Porto, Portugal.[122]
Robert Mapplethorpe. Coreografia per una mostra / Choreography for an Exhibition, Madre museum, Naples, Italy. Curated by Laura Valente and Andrea Viliani.
2019:
Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. January 25 – July 10, 2019 and July 24, 2019 – January 5, 2020[123]
obert Mapplethorpe made his reputation as a photographer in the period between the 1969 gay-bashing raid at the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street and the identification of HIV in 1983. This was the High Renaissance, the Age of Discovery, the Bourbon Louis Romp, the Victorian imperial pomp, the Jazz Age, the Camelot moonshot, the Swinging Sixties of gay culture in New York.
In the 18th century New York punished sodomy with death. This was later reduced to 14 years’ solitary or hard labour. By 1950, it was only a misdemeanour. By the Seventies, it was becoming positively fashion-able, like a ten-speed bike or a breadmaking machine. The bulk of Mapplethorpe’s pictures of this era, which include a lot of willies, active and inert, chained, pinned, licked and bound, are, depending on your taste, exhilaratingly frank or wince-makingly disgusting.
Mapplethorpe then made a second reputation, after an Aids diagnosis. In his decline, he shot a series of self-portraits showing the ravages the disease wrought on his once- pretty features. These mix residual narcissism with pitiless self-analysis. When he died, aged 42, in 1989 the New York Times obituary described him (and the foundation he established) as ‘a symbol of courage and resistance to the disease’. It said perhaps a little less about his photography.
The man has acquired a reverential aura, witnessed, not least, by these monumental books, each flawlessly produced and very heavy. One is a complete retrospective of his photographs, another a fascinating trawl of his archives and the third a gorgeous album of his flower pictures. But what was he like? In 1969 Mapplethorpe and his lover du jour, the aspiring poet Patti Smith, a woman, moved into the Chelsea Hotel, the Beat hangout. Income from their combined arts could not cover the rent, so Smith went shoplifting while Mapplethorpe went hustling on the East Side.
At this point, it is not quite clear to what extent Smith recognised her partner’s proclivities — although surely ages spent in front of the mirror, combing his hair while in tight leather trousers, then going missing for several hours, might have hinted at the possibility. Later, by now permanently gay, Mapplethorpe made a film about changing Smith’s used sanitary towels. Andy Warhol called the couple ‘dirty’ and ‘horrible’.
In 1977 Mapplethorpe had his first exhibitions in New York: simultaneous showings at the Holly Solomon Gallery and the Kitchen. He was not a reporter, but an active participant in the often violent homoerotic world he photographed. True, he took pictures of nude women, but they seem nerveless and lack sexual charge. It is quite impossible to separate Mapplethorpe’s art from Mapplethorpe’s life, but there are telling contrasts. The former is fine, controlled and often very beautiful, even when treating ugly matter. The latter was a long, long sequence of what Eve Babitz called ‘squalid overboogie’.
These were interesting times. With an incongruity that boggles, the crusty old snob and thin-lipped queen Sir John Pope-Hennessy became a fan, as a letter reproduced in The Archive reveals. ‘The Pope’ had promoted himself from the V&A to the Metropolitan Museum. Until he arrived in New York, he had been a dogmatic champion of traditional art, resisting modernity on all fronts. Yet one 1986 visit to Mapple-thorpe’s studio to have his picture taken convinced the Pope of new artistic possibilities: ‘Painters’ studios are no longer the places where prime works of art are produced,’ he wrote. History does not record what was the precise nature of Pope-Hennessy’s catalytic experience.
But what of the art? Mapple-thorpe, from a humble Anglo-German-Irish family in Queens, studied at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute. Here his interests were those of a regular art student and The Archive reproduces some late Sixties work which includes tormented Mervyn Peake-like etchings, pen-and-ink drawings, polaroids, riffs on Pop and Duchampian assemblages.
His mature photographs reveal an interest in classical composition, learnt at Pratt, and a keen awareness of physical form. Claiming some inspiration from the Vogue photographer George Hoyningen-Huene, theatrically mannered lighting and Greek-heroic postures added exceptional dignity to his subjects, even when those subjects were a spot of energetic fisting or a black man’s enormous schlong hanging dependent from the fly of a tailored polyester suit.
In 1980 Mapplethorpe made a famous pair of self-portraits. One showed a macho hunk leatherman, while the other showed the same man cross-dressed, made-up and coiffured into a femme fatale. I suppose you could say that these pictures illustrate the ambivalence we all feel about sexual identity. But then Mapplethorpe, like Georgia O’Keefe, began eroticising flowers. He had been photographing irises, orchids and lilies from early on, using them to practise composition and finding them possibly more biddable than his frisky partners in gimp masks and chains. But he was no horticulturalist: flowers were brought in from 28th Street market, photographed and then discarded. It is not difficult to sense a metaphor trying to emerge here.
Mapplethorpe’s reputation was generated by the self-regarding, self-promoting, self-adoring milieu of which he was a part. His was a New York of chancers and publicists and semi-talented hustlers like Jean-Michel Basquiat, who rose on a vortex of hype. In Outsiders, his 1963 study of deviance, the sociologist Howard S. Becker wrote: ‘Deviant behaviour is behaviour that people so label.’ And, as an extension to that: ‘It’s a work of art because we say it is!’ For reasons of this hermeticism, Manhattan’s favourite literary review is known as the New York Review of Each Others’ Books, a sort of self-help club. In this narcissistic reflecting pool, Mapple-thorpe made many remarkable images. Separated from Smith, he was assisted in his career by his rich, influential lover Sam Wagstaff, a magus of the scene, a collector and patron of Minimalism, who died of Aids two years before Mapplethorpe.
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Calculated outrage was a part of the Mapplethorpe project. A 1989 exhibition at Washington’s Corcoran Gallery featured a self-portrait with the thick end of a bullwhip up his bum. There were, additionally, images of urophagia. Reacting to the fuss, the Corcoran cancelled the show and it moved to the less stellar Washington Project for the Arts. With predictably great success, Mapplethrope outraged, for example, the Family Association of Tupelo, Missouri, who did not see in the recreational ingestion of urine, no matter how artfully presented or evidently enjoyed, any valuable source of inspiration or delight.
Polemics and pornography are inseparable in Mapplethorpe, and sometimes get in the way of his art: his flowers are perhaps more unambiguously enjoyable than his frolics. Patti Smith later described herself as a bad girl trying to be good while Mapplethorpe was a good boy trying to be bad. In that, he certainly succeeded. And Mapplethorpe told Dominick Dunne that he thought S&M stood for ‘sex and magic’, a nice retrospective rationalisation. Will his art outlive his status as an Aids martyr? Is there more to it than a fashionable interest in extreme sex? Do these books tell us anything new? I am not at all sure.
the question that occupied the minds of all the people involved, in the days preceding the highly publicized and eagerly anticipated vernissage of the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, the photographer who took his art to the outer limits of his own personal sexual experience, at the Whitney last July.
For nearly two years the rumors of Robert Mapplethorpe’s illness had been whispered in the New York art and social circles in which he moved as a celebrated and somewhat notorious figure. The death in January 1987 of the New York aristocrat and collector Sam Wagstaff of AIDS had brought the matter of Mapplethorpe’s illness with the same disease out into the open. Mapplethorpe, the principal inheritor of Sam Wagstaff’s fortune, had once been Wagstaff’s lover and later, for years, his great and good friend. The inheritance, believed to be in the neighborhood of $7 million—some say more, depending on the value of his art and silver collections—made the already much-talked-about Mapplethorpe, a famed figure of the night in the netherworld of New York, even more talked about, especially when the will was contested by the sister of Sam Wagstaff, Mrs. Thomas Jefferson IV of New York. Mapplethorpe has never avoided publicity; indeed, he has carefully nurtured his celebrity since his work first came to public notice in the mid-seventies.
That summer night at the Whitney Museum, there were sighs of relief when he did arrive for the opening, having been released from St. Vincent’s Hospital only days before. He was in a wheelchair, surrounded by members of his entourage, carrying a cane with a death’s-head top and wearing a stylish dinner jacket and black velvet slippers with his initials embroidered in gold on them—a vastly different uniform from the black leather gear that had become his trademark. For those who had not seen the once handsome figure in some time, the deterioration of his health and physical appearance was apparent and shocking. His hair looked wispy. His thin neck protruded from the wing collar of his dinner shirt like a tortoise’s from its shell. But even ill, he was a man who commanded attention, and who expected it. A grouping of furniture had been placed in the center of the second of the four galleries where the exhibition was hung, and there he sat, with his inner circle in attendance, receiving the homage of his friends and admirers, a complex olio of swells and freaks, famous and unknown, that makes up the world of Robert Mapplethorpe. His eyes, darting about, missed nothing. He nodded his head and smiled, speaking in a voice barely above a whisper. “It’s a wonderful night,” person after person said to him, and he agreed. He was enjoying himself immensely. On the wall facing him hung Jim and Tom, Sausalito, his 1977–78 triptych of two men in black leather, adorned with the accoutrements of sadomasochistic bondage and torture. In the photographs, Jim, the master, is urinating into the willing, even eager, mouth of Tom, the tied-up slave. “Marvelous,” said one after another of the fashionable crowd as they surveyed the work. “Surreal” was the word that came to my mind.
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However much you may have heard that this exhibition was not a shocker, believe me, it was a shocker. Robert Mapplethorpe was described by everyone I interviewed as the man who had taken the sexual experience to the limits in his work, a documentarian of the homoerotic life in the 1970s at its most excessive, resulting, possibly, in the very plague that was killing its recorder. Even his floral photographs are erotic; as critics have pointed out, he makes it quite clear that flowers are the sexual organs of plants. But the crowds that poured in that night, and kept pouring in for the following three months that the exhibition remained up, had not come just to see the still lifes of stark flowers, or the portraits of bejeweled and elegant ladies of society, like Carolina Herrera and Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis and Paloma Picasso, and of artist friends, like David Hockney and Louise Nevelson and Willem de Kooning, which are also very much a part of Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre. They had come to see the sexually loaded pictures, freed of all inhibitions, that were hanging side by side with the above in the galleries of the Whitney, like the startling Man in Polyester Suit, in which an elephantine-size black penis simply hangs out of the unzipped fly of a man whose head is cropped, or the even more startling Marty and Veronica, in which Marty makes oral love to a stockinged and girdled Veronica, whose upper body is cropped off at her bare breasts. Mapplethorpe was a participant in the dark world he photographed, not a voyeur, a point he made clear by allowing a self-portrait showing his rectum—rarely considered to be one of the body’s beauty spots—to be hung on the wall of the museum, with a bull-whip up it. The Mapplethorpe sexual influence is so great that in the otherwise scholarly introduction to the catalogue of the show, Richard Marshall, an associate curator of the Whitney, made reference to this same photograph as the “Self Portrait with a whip inserted in his ass.” That night, and on two subsequent visits to the exhibition, I watched the reactions of the viewers to the more graphically sexual pictures. They went from I-can’t-believe-what-I’m-seeing-on-the-walls-of-the-Whitney-Museum looks to nudges and titters, to nervous, furtive glances to the left and right to see if it was safe to really move in and peer, and, finally, to a subdued sadness, a wondering, perhaps, of how many of the men whose genitalia they were looking at were still alive.
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“On the opening night this amazing strength came to Robert,” said Flora Biddle, the granddaughter of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who is the chairman of the board of trustees of the Whitney Museum, which her grandmother started. “At the end of the evening he got up and walked out, after he had come in in a wheelchair.”
Later, Mapplethorpe told me his feelings about the opening. “It was pretty good. I kept thinking what it would have been like if I’d been feeling better.”
“You’ve become really famous, Robert,” I said. “How does that feel?”
“Great,” he said quietly, but shook his head at the same time. “I’m quite frustrated I’m not going to be around to enjoy it. The money’s coming in, though. I’m making more money now than I’ve ever made before.”
Today Mapplethorpe charges $10,000 for a sitting. His one-of-a-kind pictures sell for an average of $20,000 each. A Mapplethorpe print from the Robert Miller Gallery, his dealer in New York, starts at $5,000.
“I seem to read something about you every day in the press,” I said.
“I do love publicity,” he replied. “Good publicity.”
In a sense, Sam Wagstaff created Robert Mapplethorpe, but anyone who knows Robert Mapplethorpe will tell you that he was ready and waiting to be created. They met over the telephone when Mapplethorpe was twenty-five years old and Sam was fifty. “Are you the shy pornographer?” Wagstaff asked when he telephoned him. Robert had heard of Sam before the call. “Everyone said there was a person in the art world I should meet. So Sam came over to look at my etchings, so to speak.”
At that time the totally unknown Mapplethorpe was sharing an apartment in Brooklyn with the then totally unknown poet and later rock ’n’ roll star Patti Smith, who has remained one of his closest friends. Although he was, in his own words, “doing photographs of sexuality” with a Polaroid camera back then, he did not yet consider himself a photographer. The Polaroid camera had been purchased for him by John McKendry, the curator of prints and photographs at the Metropolitan Museum. Mapplethorpe had become a sort of adopted son to McKendry and his wife, Maxine de la Falaise, the daughter of the English portrait painter Sir Oswald Birley, and was taken about by them into the smart circles of people who later became his friends and patrons. Wagstaff and Mapplethorpe became positive influences on each other’s lives. The handsome and patrician Wagstaff, who graduated from Yale and once worked in advertising, had long since moved away from the Upper East Side and New York society world of his birth into the bohemian world downtown. A former museum curator, he had become more and more of a reclusive figure, involved with a group devoted to self-fulfillment called Arica, and sometimes, according to Mapplethorpe, observing whole days of silence. Wagstaff encouraged Mapplethorpe in his photography, and Mapplethorpe persuaded Wagstaff to start collecting photographs. “He became obsessed with photography,” said Mapplethorpe. “He bought with a vengeance. It went beyond anything I imagined. Through him, I started looking at photographs in a much more serious way. I got to know dealers. I went with him when he was buying things. It was a great education, although I had my own vision right from the beginning. If you look at my early Polaroids, the style was then what I have now.”
Richard Marshall states in his introduction in the catalogue that Mapplethorpe “did not feel a strong ideological commitment to photography; rather it simply became the medium that could best convey his statement.” Explaining this, Marshall said, “He wasn’t a photographer who found his subject. The camera became the best way for him to express himself. Before that he was into collage, drawings, et cetera. He took up the camera to play with, and found that it was what he was looking for.”
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Barbara Jakobson, who was one of Mapplethorpe’s first avid supporters as well as an old friend of Wagstaff’s, said, “When I become enthusiastic about an artist, I do not keep my mouth shut. Within five minutes the jungle drums are beating. I like to see people I admire succeed. That was when our friendship started. Robert really saved Sam Wagstaff’s life. At the beginning of the seventies, anyone who knew Sam said that he was virtually a recluse. Robert is the one who got him interested in collecting photography. Sam revolutionized the way we look at photographs. When he sold his collection to the Getty Museum, his position in photography was forever assured.”
Mapplethorpe does not stint in his acknowledgment of his late friend’s patronage. “I was a real hippie. Sam was a real hippie too. Financially he certainly helped me. He was very generous. We never actually lived together. I had a loft on Bond Street which he bought for me. He had a loft on Bond Street too. We were lovers as well. I think if you’re going to do a story, you should get all the facts. It lasted a couple of years. Then we became best friends. I even introduced him to James Nelson, who became his boyfriend after me.” He paused before he added, “He’s sick at this point too.”
“With AIDS?”
“Yes. He’s going through all his money. He’s spending like crazy. He rents an apartment at Number One Fifth Avenue, where he and Sam lived, but Sam’s apartment in that building has been sold.”
Shortly after we talked, Jim Nelson died. Nelson, a former hairstylist for the television soap opera All My Children, inherited 25 percent of Wagstaff’s residuary estate, and Mapplethorpe inherited 75 percent. Nelson, aware that he was dying, wanted his money immediately, so Mapplethorpe, through their lawyers, bought out Nelson’s share. As Nelson’s life neared its end, he fulfilled a long-held dream and rented two suites on the Queen Elizabeth 2, one for himself and one for a companion, and sailed to England, where he stayed in a suite at the Ritz Hotel, and then took the Concorde back to New York. He spent the last day of his life making up a list of people he wanted to be notified of his death and another list of people he did not want to be notified, one of these being the person who told me this story.
Barbara Jakobson said, “It was great to observe Robert and Sam together. Sam got such a kick out of Robert, and Robert allowed Sam to be indulgent. Sam was a Yankee with cement in his pocket, but he was very generous with Robert. Sam always meant for Robert to have his money. I was very unhappy over the publicity about the will after Sam died.”
Another close woman friend of both men, who did not want to be named, said, “Robert was looking for a patron, and along came Sam. Sam made Robert’s career. He showed Robert this other way of life. Robert was into learning more than anyone I ever knew. When Robert met Sam, all the doors opened for him. Sam was his sugar daddy in a way.”
Most of Wagstaff’s money came from his stepfather, Donald Newhall, who left him and his sister shares of the Newhall Land and Farming Company in California, which later went public. Over the years, Wagstaff sold off some of his shares to buy his art, photography, and silver collections. In his will he left bequests of $100,000 each to the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, and the New York Public Library, as well as $10,000 and the family silver to his sister, Mrs. Jefferson, and $10,000 to each of her three children.
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“She’s enormously rich,” said Mapplethorpe about Mrs. Jefferson. “She didn’t need the money.”
“Then why did she contest the will?”
Mapplethorpe shrugged. “She needed entertainment,” he said. In the long run, the litigation never went to trial; Wagstaff’s sister decided against proceeding with the suit on the day of jury selection. Several subsequent lawsuits over Wagstaff’s million-dollar silver collection, in which Mapplethorpe charged the New-York Historical Society with “fraudulent conduct” in obtaining a five-year loan of Wagstaff’s silver as he lay dying, were settled out of court.
Mapplethorpe’s lawyer, Michael Stout, who handles many prominent people in the creative arts, said about him, “Robert is the most astute businessman of any of my clients. If there is a decision to be made, he understands the issues and votes the right way.”
Although I had known Sam Wagstaff for years, my contact with Robert Mapplethorpe was minimal, no more than an acquaintanceship, so I was surprised when he asked for me to write this article, and more surprised when he asked to photograph me. Two years ago, right after Sam Wagstaff died, when the rumors of litigation between his family and his heir over his will were rampant, I had thought of writing an article on the subject for this magazine. Mapplethorpe, however, let it be known through his great friend Suzie Frankfurt, the socialite interior decorator, that he did not wish me to write such a piece, and I immediately desisted. Later I saw him at the memorial service for Sam that was held at the Metropolitan Museum. Already ill himself, he made a point of thanking me for not writing the article.
I had met Mapplethorpe for the first time several years earlier, at a dinner given by the Earl of Warwick at his New York apartment. Although Mapplethorpe was then famous as a photographer, the celebrity that was so much a part of his persona was due equally to his reputation as a leading figure in the sadomasochistic subculture of New York. Indeed, he was the subject of endless stories involving dark bars and black men and bizarre behavior of the bondage and domination variety. He arrived late for the dinner, dressed for the post-dinner-party part of his night in black leather, and became in no time the focus of attention and unquestionably the star of Lord Warwick’s party. He was at ease in his surroundings and, surprising to me, up on the latest gossip of the English smart set, telling stories in which Guinness and Tennant names abounded. When coffee was served, he took some marijuana and a package of papers out of his pocket, rolled a joint, lit it, inhaled deeply, all the time continuing a story he was telling, and passed the joint to the person on his right. It was not a marijuana-smoking group, and the joint was declined and passed on by each person to the next, except for one guest who, gamely, took a few tokes and then passed out at the table, after saying, “Strong stuff.” Unperturbed, Mapplethorpe continued talking until it was time for his exit. After he was gone, those who remained talked about him.
Like everything else about Robert Mapplethorpe, the studio where he now lives and works on a major crosstown street in the Chelsea section of New York, which was also purchased for him by Wagstaff, is enormously stylish and handsomely done. In 1988 it was photographed by HG magazine, and Martin Filler wrote in the accompanying text, “Mapplethorpe’s rooms revel in the pleasures of art for art’s sake and reconfirm his aesthetic genealogy in a direct line of descent from Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley through Christian Bérard and Jean Cocteau.” There are things to look at in every direction, a mélange of objects and pictures, but everything has its place. Order and restraint prevail. “You create your own world,” said Mapplethorpe. “The one that I want to live in is very precise, very controlled.” It fits in with his personality that he pays his bills instantly on receiving them.
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Each time we met, we sat in a different area. In the back sitting room of the floor-through loft space, the windows have elegant brown-black taffeta tieback curtains designed b