![]() Mapplethorpe had confided to several friends that he blamed a black man for infecting him with the AIDS virus, but given his boast of having had sex with an estimated thousand men, he couldn't possibly know for sure. "He was so angry I kept waiting for him to explode."Īnd explode he did, by rampaging through the gay bars to pick up black men. "Robert was really running away," Myers explained. He seemed almost like an utter misfit version of Truman Capote: a social butterfly who used his subjects to his own benefit, not for anything else his models often spoke of feeling used in a bad way.ĭue to a highly promiscuous lifestyle without the use of condoms - and also due to Mapplethorpe's liking of coprophagy - he was often ill, and finally was hit with AIDS, which he denied having until the bitter end. It also pointed to a darker side of his nature, which would later emerge in his sexual relationships with other men - a need to break all the rules and transgress taboos. Scratch's brief and bizarre history encapsulated many of the major themes of Mapplethorpe's adult life - his preoccupation with images of death and violence his fascination with the devil his desire to transform the ugly, or freakish, into works of beauty. The studio was soon covered in urine and feces, and when friends first came to visit they were rendered speechless by the squalor and by Scratch's habit of entertaining Mapplethorpe by masturbating in front of him. The owner failed to tell Mapplethorpe that Scratch wasn't housebroken, and while Mapplethorpe made a few feeble attempts at training Scratch, he pronounced the monkey "uncontrollable" and gave it the run of the apartment. ![]() He had purchased the animal from a Brooklyn pet store, where the owner had given him a discount because the monkey was already an adult. ![]() Of all the stories connected to the photographer, the monkey saga remains one of the strangest. The following quote from this book seems to expose a lot about Mapplethorpe:Īt the beginning of the semester Mapplethorpe had moved from the apartment on Willoughby Avenue to a ground-floor studio on DeKalb Avenue, which he shared with a pet monkey named Scratch. He found Sam Wagstaff, his sugar daddy and main curator, who made his career lift. Then, interlocked with religion, pain, sex and discovering photography, everything changed. Mapplethorpe dropped out, moved, dabbled with drugs and blew into the art world with Patti Smith, with whom he lived for seven years.ĭiscovering his homosexuality, which he hid from his parents for his entire life, was key. Nancy Nemeth, ROTC Military Ball Queen, 1964 He was almost the stereotypic 'good boy.' " "Robert was a little too intense and conservative for me. Mapplethorpe was a shining example of "niceness" until he left the military academy where his parents had sent him to become "a man". ![]() So, what draws people to Mapplethorpe? Is it because of his images of people, especially the sexually toned ones? His near-marriage with Patti Smith while living with her for seven years? Anything else? Probably the sex-related pictures, and the American trials for obscenity charges that followed after Mapplethorpe's death due to AIDS in 1989. ![]() He seems also to have been a parasite, a racist, a nice guy, brutal and a relentless self-serving publicity-machine. A sometimes mediocre photographer with a keen eye for disrupting scenes through being a punk, sometimes shaking things up in ways that nobody else had done before him. ‘I wouldn’t call him “nigger” all the time,’ he said, offended. ‘You’re looking for an intelligent, successful black millionaire who wants you - a white man - to call him “nigger”?’ “‘Let me get this straight,’ she said, dumbfounded. It was like watching a friend being machine-gunned.’” “‘His body was being attacked from every side. ‘The flowers,’ she explained, ‘were meant for the patient across the hall.’” One afternoon a nurse presented him with a modest floral arrangement that he might otherwise have thrown in the trash, except for the inscription on the card that read ‘Love, Mom and Dad.’ He knew his mother was ill so it meant Harry had sent the flowers himself, and moved by the gesture of reconciliation, he turned to Knaust and said, ‘Do you believe my father took of this?’ A few minutes later the nurse reappeared and apologized for the mix-up. “Mapplethorpe’s parents didn’t visit him because had just been released from hospital and was recuperating at home. ![]()
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