Robert Mapplethorpe

Robert Mapplethorpe, “Jack Walls”, 1982, Gelatin Silver Print, Getty Museum

Chicago-born artist Jack Walls has been a vital part of the New York art world for over 30 years. While his visual artwork primarily focuses on painting and collage, Walls is also a writer, poet and performer. In the early 1980s in New York, he met and lived as a couple with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, sitting for photographs and becoming his muse. This relationship lasted until Mapplethorpe’s untimely death in March of 1989. Since then, Walls has become a source of inspiration for a new generation of young artists including: New York City photographer Ryan McGinley, sculptor Dan Colen, and the late multi-media artist Dash Snow. Jack Walls currently lives and works in Hudson, New York.

Painter and poet Jack Walls is considered an ‘inside outsider’ when it comes to his own art which extends across all mediums including drawing, photo collage, poetry and painting. Each work is discovered through Walls’ personal patterns and discipline. As he navigates from one series to the next, he repeats and refashions successful themes. The overall effect fashions a cohesive narrative while still emphasizing his personal style.

“My time with Robert was a learning experience; there was so much to absorb being around him. We worked all the time, everything was about work, but you didn’t really feel like you were working. And yes, it was glamorous, we were invited everywhere. We were very social, we were young… we travelled. He was smart, but not in an intellectual way because he never read books, he was a canny observer, his aesthetic and taste were better than most. Needless to say there wasn’t too much about Robert that was average.”

—Jack Walls, Interview with Eduardo Gion Espejo-Saavedra for GPS Radar, September of 2017

Image reblogged with many thanks to : https://leomanlds.tumblr.com

Looking at Mapplethorpe

Photographer Unknown, (Looking at Mapplethorpe), Photo Shoot, Model Unknown

In June 1989, just a few months after his passing from AIDS, a retrospective of over 150 of Robert Mapplethorpe’s works, titled “The Perfect Moment” was due to open at the Corcoran Art Gallery in Washington, DC. In a misguided attempt to avoid controversy due to the sexually-explicit nature of some of the photographs, the director cancelled the exhibition.

In protest, Mapplethorpe supporters congregated outside the gallery on the evening of June 30, 1989, projecting giant images of his work onto the side of the building, creating a powerful and moving tribute, and demonstrating the strong impact that the artist’s work had made on popular culture.

“I am obsessed with beauty. I want everything to be perfect, and of course it isn’t. And that’s a tough place to be because you’re never satisfied.”

-Robert Mapplethorpe

Robert Mapplethorpe

Robert Mapplethorpe

Robert Mapplethorpe ( November 4, 1946 – March 9, 1989) was an American photographer, known for his sensitive yet blunt treatment of controversial subject-matter in the large-scale, highly stylized black and white medium of photography. His work featured an array of subjects, including celebrity portraits, male and female nudes, self-portraits and still-life images of flowers. His most controversial work is that of the underground BDSM scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s of New York. The homoeroticism of this work fuelled a national debate over the public funding of controversial artwork.

“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