NEW YORK FLOWERS b y DIMITRI LEVAS 6 INTRODUCTION b y HERBERT MUSCHAMP 11 POLAROIDS 15 ORCHIDS 35 ROSES 97 IRISES 131 TULIPS 147 FLORA 189 LILIES 279 LIST OF PLATES 345 THE COMPLETE FLOWERS CHRONOLOGICAL INDEX 349
NEW YORK FLOWERS DIMITRI LEVAS I first met Robert Mapplethorpe at the Simon Lowinsky Gallery in San Francisco in 1978. He was there for the opening of his first solo exhibition on the West Coast, I was originally from Albany, a small town across the bay. I purchased Jim/Sausalito, a photograph of a man in a leather mask and pants crouching in the stairwell of a dark passage. Earlier I had seen the picture reproduced in an article on Robert s S&M photographs in Drummer Magazine. I was introduced to Robert as one of his young collectors and we sat together at a party in his honor at the art-filled home of a friend. Though both of us were shy, surprisingly, we quickly established a rapport. A year later, I moved to New York City and our paths crossed with some regularity through mutual friends. We had similar obsessions with art, photography, and the decorative arts. Robert would say, I can t have just anybody assisting me. I need somebody who I can really communicate with. Early on he sensed that I could help him with his pictures. No one gets me good flowers, Dimitri, he said. I bet you could get me good flowers. Soon he invited me to his loft on Bond Street to sit in on photo shoots and observe the way he worked. These were mostly sessions for figure studies or portraits. Within a year, whenever I had time in the evenings or on weekends we would work together on pictures. Since I was helping a number of commercial photographers from fashion magazines and for advertising, I would often have leftover props. I would call him and say I had a beautiful pheasant from a Vogue shoot, or a large silver fish, or even a spider. Usually he would photograph these discarded treasures late in the afternoon when the New York light was low and came through the horizontal blinds on the windows of his loft, now on Twenty-third Street, to create an almost film-noir mood. The blinds, all the design rage at the time, gave his pictures that eighties American Gigolo look. But the flowers were something altogether different. When Robert was first given a Polaroid camera in the early seventies by his friend John McKendry, the former head of prints and photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he taught himself about light and exposure by photographing flowers. He didn t want to ask his friends to pose for hours while he figured out the technicalities. He photographed arrangements in his loft and sometimes he made studies of flowers in the London or New York homes of friends. In the late seventies and early eighties he was collecting American Arts and Crafts furniture and vases, so they figure heavily in his first squareformat Hasselblad pictures a bunch of carnations viewed from above in a Grueby bowl, a spray of weeds in a Roycroft metal vase on a Stickley pedestal, or baby s breath in a butterscotch Steuben glass vase. If friends had fashionable faux-japanese flower arrangements in their apartments, he would go around and photograph the displays, again often in front of horizontal blinds Gotham Noir. When Robert and I became friends, the routine changed. I would get up early on Saturday mornings and go to the flower market on Twentyeighth Street, which opened at the crack of dawn. I would pick out the flowers that had the most architectonic shapes and those with the most perfect form. I would let myself in to Robert s loft on Twenty-third Street, put them in water, and then go to the flea market on Twentysixth Street to hunt for treasures. I would go back to Robert s to have my lunch, while he had his breakfast, and show him my flea-market finds, which he would often buy off me. At around three or four in the afternoon he would photograph what I had brought that morning. I learned so much about shadow and light from Robert. I was fascinated by his attention to details before ever exposing film. We experimented with the flower pictures, changing backgrounds or using color cards, strange angles, and handheld lights. He would often let me set up a shoot, but if through the lens it looked like something he had seen before or resembled a photograph with which I was particularly enamored at the time a nineteenth-century still life by Charles Aubry or a modernist image by Paul Strand he would catch it and say he wanted to change it. He grew in my esteem each session. If I had designed a set for a particular shoot, for example a wall with a circle cut out of it, he would keep it for months, using it over and over for flower pictures as well as portraits or nudes, until I begged him to let me tear it down. 6 7
No one would ever have called Robert a connoisseur of flowers. If, say, at the opening of an exhibition he was given a flower arrangement, he would photograph it and discard it almost immediately. The same was true with flowers acquired strictly for the purpose of making photographs. They did not linger in the studio. Paradoxically, he cherished the vessels that held the arrangements. These coveted objects, often made of Swedish porcelain or Murano glass, were carefully collected and arranged, often by color, on specially built shelves that were cantilevered out from the walls of the studio, which was also his home. As one of Robert s closest friends up until his death in 1989 and as a charter member of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, I have a particular interest in his legacy. This is the fourth time the flower photographs have been published as a single subject, and now it seems appropriate to think of them within the realm of Robert s fundamental visual language. Many of the pictures often allude to floral sexual anatomy, so it would be almost redundant to juxtapose flowers with images of genitalia. But pairing the flower pictures with his other photographs, such as the self-portraits at the beginning and end of the book, can be revealing. Robert liked to pair images in framed one-ofa-kind pieces to demonstrate a certain minimalist or modernist formal approach. Even when the flowers were in fussy arrangements they could still fit comfortably with his other work because his method was the same if the subject was a portrait, a figure, a statue, or a flower. Despite the title, Mapplethorpe Flora, and the corresponding arrangement of the flowers within the book according to botanical species, these photographs reflect something other than a botanist s appreciation. Though flowers are often viewed as symbols of purity and innocence, under Robert s gaze they seem decadent and dark as well as erotic. I remember Robert s excitement if a flower picture appeared slightly sinister. He loved the way a shadow of an orchid resembled the head of a devil. Robert would often refer to these pictures as New York flowers. When people suggested that the photographs offered metaphors for sex, unlike Georgia O Keeffe, who was adamant that none of her floral paintings had anything to do with male or female genitalia, Robert was undisturbed. What makes Robert s flower pictures so successful is the interplay of the sensual and the art historical reference. Robert was well grounded in the role of flowers in the history of painting. Here the sensual and the prurient are intertwined. Robert s flowers are not always about sex, but they are always sensual. When Walker Evans was teaching at Yale he would tell his students that photography is an art that should never be practiced on or near a beach. In other words, he was instructing them that if they wanted to be taken seriously as artists, they should stay away from pictorial or predictably beautiful subjects. Robert was no more shy of approaching beauty than he was of approaching sex, which he did unflinchingly. He knew that inherent and explicit beauty could be viewed with suspicion, and he was often criticized for working in a field where one could stumble too easily into cliché and kitsch. The conventions for the photography of the time were prescribed by such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, which in the late seventies and throughout the eighties had very different concerns. Such institutions reinforced a kind of photographic orthodoxy, from much of which Robert was distanced. In contrast, the range of his subjects, from a rosebud to a penis, required an emphatically formal, if not a geometric, language. Without this formality his work would have been impossible. Yet, despite the demonstrative beauty, his photographs lie at the very heart of the period to such an extent that they have come to be suggestive emblems of the entire era. 8 9
ORCHIDS
37
38 39
40 41
70 71
72 73
ROSES
101
103
127
129