After forty years, Florence dedicates major exhibition to Robert Mapplethorpe, with unprecedented comparison

Opening on September 23, 2023 at the Museo Novecento in Florence is the exhibition Beauty and Desire, open until February 14, 2024, with which the Florentine museum wants to pay tribute to one of the greatest exponents of twentieth-century photography, Robert Mapplethorpe (New York, November 4, 1946-Boston, March 9, 1989). Forty years after the major exhibition in 1983 at the Palazzo delle Cento Finestre, which made Mapplethorpe’s work known precisely in Florence, the images of the famous New York photographer return to the Tuscan capital on the occasion of a project, organized with the collaboration of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation and the Fondazione Alinari per la Fotografia, which offers a never-before-seen comparison with the shots of Wilhelm von Gloeden and a selection of photographs from the Alinari Archives.
Curated by Sergio Risaliti, director of the Museo Novecento, together with Eva Francioli and Muriel Prandato and housed in the exhibition spaces on the first and second floors, Beauty and Desire is the museum venue’s second major exhibition dedicated to photography. The exhibition draws from a substantial nucleus of works highlighting Mapplethorpe’s intense artistic production, emphasizing the link of his research with classicism, as well as his sculptural approach to the photographic medium, made evident as much in his study of the male and female nude as in still life, equating bodies with objects according to a sculptor’s vision and sensibility.

Building on this focus, Robert Mapplethorpe’s work is compared with a number of photographs dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries from the Alinari Archives. These include some images of Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, among the pioneers of staged photography and a point of reference for some of Mapplethorpe’s photographs. One of the hallmarks of the atmospheres that animate von Gloeden’s compositions is precisely the reference to the past, conceived as an inexhaustible source of subjects and suggestions.
The exhibition draws from a nucleus of about fifty photographs chosen from the hundreds of images in Mapplethorpe’s intense artistic production divided into thematic sections, through which it is possible to focus on Mapplethorpe’s relationship with antiquity, his passion for the masters who preceded him such as von Gloeden and the Alinari brothers, and the close understanding if not affinity with Michelangelo Buonarroti, whom Mapplethorpe was inspired by and with whom he also relates thanks to the sculptural photographs taken by the Alinari.
An interest in antiquity and a passion for the photographers who preceded him are a constant in the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, who was a passionate and curious collector of photographs. There is to be considered that Mapplethorpe made a trip to Italy in the early 1980s, during which he had the opportunity to directly confront the landscape of Naples and the power of the ruins that cancel in the photographer’s eyes the distance between the present and the past. It was in Naples that Mapplethopre probably came to know von Gloeden’s photographs for the first time, thanks mainly to Lucio Amelio, a famous gallery owner, linked to Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys, who was an appreciated connoisseur and collector of the German photographer, and to whom he dedicated between 1977 and 1978 an exhibition and two publications, with prefaces by Marina Miraglia and Roland Barthes. It was in the same gallery of Lucio Amelio that Mapplethorpe exhibited in 1984, proposing an autonomous approach to photography, and an intense combination of formal elements and subjective content that were transversal and free from all conformism, in which the continuous metamorphoses between Apollonian spirit and Dionysian sensuality, between the figurative archetypes of the classical world and the iconography of the Catholic world, were to surface.
The subjects, poses, and suspended atmospheres of the compositions, so studied and thoughtful in their studio staging, lead to the discovery of an unconventional idea of beauty and eros. The works in the exhibition, while drawing inspiration from the canons of classicism, seem to lead along aesthetic trajectories that are not taken for granted and are at times perturbing, raising and resolving questions about the theme of the body and sexuality whose echoes resonate, at times unchanged, in contemporary visual culture. Robert Mapplethorpe’s artistic greatness lies precisely in this ability to suppress all false moralism, forcing the viewer into a frontal, iconic observation of bodies and sexes exhibited as objects, while at the same time transfiguring these ’objects’ into pure forms, with an interplay of pictorial and plastic contrasts, postures and framing, that suggest an earlier matrix, a model from ancient Greek and Roman, from the Renaissance past, a Caravaggesque work or a neo-classical prototype.
"It is with great satisfaction that we inaugurate Beauty and Desire, the extraordinary exhibition centered on the photographic work of Robert Mapplethorpe and Baron von Gloeden, to which historical photos from the Alinari archive are added, said Sergio Risaliti. "This is a project we wanted to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the great exhibition held in Florence in 1983, which made known the power and purity of Mapplethorpe’s shots to all Florentines and beyond. Beauty and Desire also confirms the Museo Novecento’s desire to be a bridge between photography at the dawn of the twentieth century and contemporary art, as well as between Florentine and international institutions such as the Alinari Foundation for Photography and the Mapplethorpe Foundation, which I want to thank for their support and scientific collaboration. With this project, the curators aim to shed new light on the complex articulation of Mapplethorpe’s research, starting with an unprecedented juxtaposition with von Gloeden’s photographs, an evocative and at times pointed comparison that reveals the recurrence of common themes: motifs that traverse time and come down to us, posing as points of reflection on current events, especially on how art, morality, religiosity and spirituality, change and evolve in their mutual relationship."
“The Alinari archives are an extraordinary cultural heritage of the past, but this exhibition clarifies how that past has continued to interact with the contemporary,” stressed Giorgio van Straten, president of the Alinari Foundation for Photography. “A stimulus for us today to build new opportunities for dialogue between historical photography and artists of the present.”
For info: www.museonovecento.it
Hours: Daily 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Closed Thursdays.

Image:
Beauty and Desire, installations. Photo by Michele Alberto Sereni

After forty years, Florence dedicates major exhibition to Robert Mapplethorpe, with unprecedented comparison

Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.