Why We’ll Never Forget Robert Mapplethorpe

Robert Mapplethorpe decided he was an important artist long before he was even making important art. Growing up in 1950s Queens, New York, he escaped to art school in Brooklyn, searching for a way to transform himself. He was the outcast who took drugs and dressed weird, until he found his path to stardom. That ambition shines through in the new HBO documentary, Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures. Directed by Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey — the producers of RuPaul’s Drag Race who have also examined oddballs and outliers in documentaries such as Party Monster, The Eyes of Tammy Faye and Inside Deep Throat — the film allows us to linger on many of those sensational images of men in states of agony and arousal, blurring gender and sexuality that continue to provoke with their questions about what can be beautiful and what can be art. His early self-portrait in which he looks at the camera with a bullwhip for a tail can be seen as a taunt and a promise of his power. Even more than the aesthetic merits of the photographs, however, is the narrative of striving that transformed Mapplethorpe from a fringe photographer into one of the most collectable artists of the last half of the 20th century.

The film begins with the voice of Senator Jesse Helms exhorting everyone to, “Look at the pictures!” He was protesting an exhibit of Mapplethorpe’s work that he viewed as pornographic, and we see the conservative politician waving what he viewed as smut, seeking to inflame the culture wars, despite the fact that Mapplethorpe had died just a few months prior at the age of 42 of AIDS. That protest turned out to solidify the artist’s legend, and the documentary continues to burnish his reputation.

“We took all our cues in making this film from Robert,” Barbato tells Rolling Stone. “From the humor in it and explicitness, to the volume of artwork that we show — because we feature almost 500 images of his art — that we’re almost shocked that it’s going to be shown anywhere because it’s so explicit! We feel like a golden shower or a fist fucking image deserves a Ken Burns treatment.”

Those photos include the X portfolio, a set of 13 formally impeccable black-and-white photographs that document the gay BDSM scene of Seventies New York City and Black Book, that eroticized the black male body, as well as the portraits of celebrities (Carolina Herrera, Brooke Shields), models and muses, such the iconic “Ken Moody and Robert Sherman,” that features the two men with alopecia — one black, one white — in profile. They’re all currently on view in a major joint retrospective exhibition, The Perfect Medium, taking place at the Getty Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through the summer.

Rather than paint him as a one-note provocateur, though, the filmmakers manage to capture the many sides to the man. “Yes, of course he wanted to be this serious artist and, yes, he was deadly earnest about his art,” Bailey says. “And at the same time, he would make pictures that were funny. ‘Man in a Polyester Suit’ is funny. ‘Whip up the Butt’ is funny. You know, ‘Devil’s Horns From the Party Store Down the Road,’ it’s funny! It’s not as if you can’t be a serious artist and hilarious at the same time.”

The filmmakers include characters, like Patti Smith and Debbie Harry, who add a certain levity to the sometimes unsettling imagery. Smith wrote about her relationship with Mapplethorpe in her memoir Just Kids, and we see the willowy poet-rocker in archival footage as she recites poetry or in those portraits of her by Mapplethorpe, including the one that later appeared on her Horses album cover. In voiceover narrative culled from existing interviews, she explains how the young lovers tried to make art while prowling for patrons in the Chelsea Hotel. Another artist on the scene, author Fran Lebowitz, recalls Mapplethorpe in her own skewering way. “He looked like a kind of ruined Cupid, and he was very reliant on his charm,” she says. “He made great use of it.”