Mapplethorpe+Munch
Jon-Ove Steihaug, ed.
Munch Museum
Mercatorfonds
Mapplethorpe+Munch
4
5
6
Foreword
Stein Olav Henrichsen
8
Mapplethorpe+Munch
Jon-Ove Steihaug
224
“Censored”: Robert Mapplethorpe
and the Erotics of Prohibition
Richard Meyer
240
Chronology
Robert Mapplethorpe
Edvard Munch
246
List of Exhibited Works
Robert Mapplethorpe
Edvard Munch
254
About the Authors
Mapplethorpe+Munch
16
Self-portraits
‘Know thyself’
This aphorism from antiquity – one of the inscriptions at the Temple of Apollo
in Delphi which is discussed by Socrates in the dialogues of Plato – provides
an appropriate inroad to Munch’s and Mapplethorpe’s self-portraits. Both
have depicted themselves in numerous self-portraits that have become an
integral part of the artist’s myths surrounding their art. The self-portrait is a
genre which has been invested with a special cultural meaning and prestige
since the Renaissance. Renaissance painters used the self-portrait as a strategic means to raise the social status of the artist from that of a craftsman
to that of a genius, a man of the spirit. This is seen for example in Albrecht
Dürer’s epoch-making self-portraits from around 1500. Romanticism’s
emphasis on the inner self of the artist reinforced the status of selfportraiture all the more.
Munch and Mapplethorpe dramatize themselves in various ways in their
self-portraits – from naked and exposed to depictions that are posed and more
theatrically self-aware. Mapplethorpe’s self-portrait with devil horns belongs
to the latter category (p. 21). He builds upon a long Christian tradition in which
the devil is evil incarnate and the lord of malevolent powers. Mapplethorpe’s
depiction also ties in with the fauns and satyrs of Greek and Roman mythology,
beings that were half animal and half human. The satyrs accompanied the
wine god Dionysus, who was linked to inebriation and madness. In The Birth of
Tragedy (1886), Friedrich Nietzsche introduces the dichotomy of the Dionysian
and Apollonian as the two defining elements of Greek culture, which reach
an artistic apex in the Greek tragedy where they are kept in balance. Apollo is
linked to artistic expression, beauty and individuality, while Dionysus is associated with intoxication, horror and the dissolution of identity. One can see
Self-portraits
17
both of these dimensions in Mapplethorpe’s art. A more specific context for
this picture is Arthur Rimbaud’s text A Season in Hell, which could readily be
called Dionysian. Five of Mapplethorpe’s photographs illustrate an English
translation of this legendary text, among them also this self-portrait. In the
photo we see Mapplethorpe with a bare chest and an intense gaze staring
directly at us. His eyes are dark and he is starkly lit from below, with a reflection in his hair from above which makes for a more ambiguous space. Devil’s
horns jut through his hair. The photo and the intense stare challenge the
viewer, ominous and suggestive. Mapplethorpe surrounded himself with devil
figures and took pictures of devil statues. In one of these we see a small
devil with a comical grin that appears to be in the process of spearing
a leather-strapped penis, lying on the table (p. 25).
Edvard Munch’s painting Self-portrait in Hell (p. 22) is in many ways
complementary to Mapplethorpe’s image of himself as a devil, and here too
we have a self-dramatization. We see Munch in half-length, turned toward us,
naked and bathed in harsh light from below, initiating some of the same saturated and moody shadow play found in Mapplethorpe. The shadows have an
even more dominant and dramatic role in the glowing atmosphere of Munch’s
picture. A spectacular shadow rises from the lighted figure like a dark tornado.
The yellow-white torso stands out in the brightness, cut off right at the pelvis
by the frame. The face recedes into shadow, while the eyes project with an
intense stare, the arms slightly lifted. Munch and Mapplethorpe both relate
to Christian beliefs. From medieval times and the Renaissance we have many
depictions of hell as a place where the damned are burned and tortured for
eternity, as seen with Hieronymus Bosch’s works or in Michelangelo’s fresco
The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel. Munch came from a religious home
and here he refers to Christian notions of sin and damnation. He knew these
well, even though he might not have really believed in them. The reference to
hell is also used as a metaphor for his own emotional condition, the feeling of
being victimized and martyred. There is a measure of vulnerability involved in
the way he places himself naked and exposed in the glaring light.
Mapplethorpe’s most sexually provocative and Dionysian self-portrait,
where he is posing with a whip, has an unmistakeably infernal touch to it
(p. 23). He is wearing a leather vest and biker chaps, fastened at the waist
but open around his buttocks. He has turned his rear end to us as he bends
forward and looks back into the camera, with a gaze that seems to challenge
the viewer. He holds a braided whip which is inserted in his anus. The whip
snakes out in curves toward the beholder, like an animal tail. The entire position is meticulously choreographed, with arms, legs and the whip creating a
complex, spatial movement and rhythm. As with Munch, the shadows play an
Mapplethorpe+Munch
10
Ibid.: 196.
Edvard Munch
Self-portrait with the Spanish Flu,
1919
National Museum of Art,
Architecture and Design, Oslo
Photo © National Museum
18
important role and are carefully calculated. The curved back is projected onto
the wall in the form of a dark shadow on the left which almost merges with the
black leather pants, while a lighter shadow on the right of the figure projects
an enlarged version of the curly hair and the facial profile, redolent of a satyr’s
head. Richard Meyer describes it as a transgressive form of self-portraiture:
‘The visibility of Mapplethorpe’s anus, alongside that of his leather chaps, vest,
boots, and bullwhip, activates an expressly homosexual form of self-portraiture,
one that defies the normative codes of phallic masculinity.’10 Meyer points
out the paradoxical way in which Mapplethorpe appears in this photo, simultaneously vulnerable and dominant, and how this muddles the typical sado­
masochistic separation of roles between domination and submission.
The distance from the dark sexual theatre (or satyr play) of this selfportrait to the assurance of death is not long. The year before he died
Mapplethorpe made a sombre portrait of a skull. He had been diagnosed with
AIDS two years earlier, in 1986, and was at this point seriously ill and undergoing treatment. The human skull lies on a shelf, seemingly floating in air, with
the dark eye sockets turned upwards and the mouth gaping, revealing missing
front teeth (1988; p. 31). The white light and the dark shadows cut diagonally
through the background and bathe the tattered skull in a nearly supernatural
downlight. The motif relates to the medieval iconography of memento mori,
which was meant to serve as a reminder of death and the transient nature of
life. We also find this in the still life paintings of Flanders and the Netherlands
from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, where skulls are present along
with objects such as hourglasses, flowers and candles as symbols of vanitas.
The human skull also turns up as an attribute in one of Mapplethorpe’s last
self-portraits (1988; p. 29). We see his slightly unfocused face against the
dark background, while his right hand holds a skull-tipped cane that is in
sharp focus. Like Mapplethorpe himself, this skull stares right at us, as part
of Mapplethorpe’s unsentimental reflection on his own death.
The consciousness of death is also very present in the first printed
self-portrait by Munch, a lithograph from 1895 (p. 28). For Munch, too,
death was close at hand, although not as impending as we sense it to be
in Mapplethorpe’s last self-portraits. Munch’s younger brother Andreas had
died the same year of pneumonia, at the age of thirty-one, and when Munch
was just five he lost his mother to tuberculosis, a disease which also killed
his big sister Sophie when she was just short of turning fourteen. As with
Mapplethorpe, in Munch’s lithograph we are confronted by the artist’s face
isolated against a dark background. The motif is often described as ‘selfportrait with a skeleton arm’, because of the bones at the bottom of the
picture. At the top, Munch has written his own name in block letters and
Self-portraits
19
the year 1895. His gaze appears to be scrutinizing and introspective, the face
pale and nearly mask-like.
In Mapplethorpe’s last self-portrait only the intense stare of the eyes is
left (1988; pp. 222–3) The unusual extended format shows a narrow section
of the face, only of the eyes. One side of the face is in shadow, while the
other is directly exposed to the light falling in from the side. In addition to
referring to the crucial meaning which vision had for him as a photographer,
his eyes were among the least stricken organs from his AIDS diagnosis.11
In another of the final self-portraits, he is sitting in a chair, leaning slightly
forward with an unsentimental gaze straight at the camera (1988; p. 35). He
is clearly enervated by the disease and wears a silk bathrobe, like a dandy.12 It
is hard not to be reminded of Munch’s Self-portrait with the Spanish Flu from
1919 (fig. p. 18). Munch sits slumped in a wicker chair, wearing a bathrobe,
his wiped-out face nearly blending in with the background. The use of colour
is extraordinary; especially the ochre shades which range from delicate
pink to the sickly yellow and evoke associations of disease and infection.13
In a late watercolour self-portrait, Munch sits nude on the floor, exposed
and displaying the same enfeebled expression (p. 32–33). He is bearded,
hunched and looking at the viewer as he supports himself on one arm, the
colours ranging from the cool bluish green to nearly inflamed shades of red.
Apart from the above-mentioned self-portraits, Mapplethorpe has also
staged himself in a number of other roles. He poses in a black leather jacket
with his hair combed back, like a 1950s rocker, perhaps, or a stereotypical
gay from the 1970s (p. 37). He also toyed with feminine stereotypes and
made versions of himself in drag (p. 38–39). Munch is also playing with the
image of himself, some self-portraits aiming for a more representative effect,
while others are of a more existential and dramatic character.
11
Cf. Patricia Morrisroe, Mapplethorpe:
A Biography
(New York: Da Capo Press, 1997
[1995]): 354.
12
The picture was taken in connection
with an interview Vanity Fair did
with Mapplethorpe in 1988 and a
portfolio of new portraits which he
made in this connection, after the
opening of his first retrospective
exhibition at Whitney Museum in
New York. The article, titled ‘Robert
Mapplethorpe’s Proud Finale’, was
published in Vanity Fair, February
1989. Morrisroe, Mapplethorpe:
351–2.
13
David Lomas discusses the role
that disease has played in Munch’s
art in his article ‘Sick Art’ (2015),
about the AIDS epidemic of our
day, as it is reflected by artists
such as Bjarne Melgaard. He points
out that the three most serious
public health threats in Munch’s
day were tuberculosis, syphilis
and alcoholism, and how these
can be linked to the notions of
‘degeneration’ which flourished
in the late 1800s and ultimately
formed the basis for the Nazis’
use of the term entartete Kunst
(‘degenerate art’). He describes
how the outbreak of AIDS in the
1980s ‘ushered in a new fin de
siècle with the apocalyptic specter
of a disease at least as lethal
as those that ravaged Europe
in Munch’s time. (…) Dubbed
the “gay plague” to begin with,
AIDS reinforced a link between
homosexuality and disease that
was a vestige of the late nineteenth
century.’ In Melgaard+Munch
(Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz / Munch
Museum, 2015): 221–2.
Mapplethorpe+Munch
84
Robert Mapplethorpe
Self-portrait, 1985
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Self-portraits
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185
Edvard Munch
Self-portrait in Hell, 1903
—
23
Robert Mapplethorpe
Self-portrait, 1977
22
Self-portraits
23
Mapplethorpe+Munch
82
Robert Mapplethorpe
Hand in Fire, 1985
—
67
Robert Mapplethorpe
Cock and Devil, 1982
24
Self-portraits
25
Mapplethorpe+Munch
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Robert Mapplethorpe
Pictures / Self-portrait, 1977
—
25
Robert Mapplethorpe
Pictures / Self-portrait, 1977
26
Self-portraits
27
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154
Edvard Munch
Self-portrait, 1895
—
132
Robert Mapplethorpe
Self-portrait, 1988
28
Self-portraits
29
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221
Edvard Munch
Dance of Death, 1915
–
129
Robert Mapplethorpe
Skull, 1988
30
Self-portraits
31
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Edvard Munch
Madonna, 1895/1902
–
80
Robert Mapplethorpe
Lydia, 1985
—
81
Robert Mapplethorpe
Lydia, 1985
114
Sexuality
115
Mapplethorpe+Munch
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Robert Mapplethorpe
Lisa Marie / Breasts, 1987
—
143
Edvard Munch
Madonna, 1894
116
Sexuality
117
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Robert Mapplethorpe
Lisa Lyon, 1982
–
128
Robert Mapplethorpe
Sphinx, 1988
26
Robert Mapplethorpe
Chrysanthemum, 1977
From Y Portfolio
–
27
Robert Mapplethorpe
Helmut and Brooks, NYC, 1978
From X Portfolio
118
Sexuality
119
Mapplethorpe+Munch
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Robert Mapplethorpe
Lisa Lyon, 1982
–
64
Robert Mapplethorpe
Lisa Lyon, 1982
120
Sexuality
121
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Sexuality
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65
Robert Mapplethorpe
Lisa Lyon, 1982
—
179
Edvard Munch
Woman With Red Hair and
Green Eyes. The Sin, 1902