Displaying items by tag: Robert Mapplethorpe

A new documentary about American artist Robert Mapplethorpe is coming soon.

HBO Documentary Films will debut Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures in April 2016, which is the first feature-length film on the late photographer, who died of AIDS in 1989.

Now is the time for the public to rediscover Mapplethorpe's work, over a quarter century after his death.

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts (or Mia, as it is styled now) announced today that Robert Cozzolino will be the museum’s new Patrick and Aimee Butler Curator of Paintings. He is expected to begin his position at the Minnesota museum on March 1, 2016.

Cozzolino comes from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In his eleven-year tenure at the Philadelphia museum, where he is currently a senior curator and the Evelyn and Will Kaplan Curator of Modern Art, Cozzolino established himself as an expert in American painting.

The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College announces a major gift of over 500 photographs from photographer, curator, and collector Jack Shear. 

Shear’s extensive donation serves as a visual history of photography from its inception in the 1840s to the present day. The collection chronicles different photographic processes, techniques, and artistic approaches from an early half-plate ambrotype of Niagara Falls to a Polaroid self-portrait by a young Robert Mapplethorpe. Historic works include important examples by photographic pioneers such as Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Eugène Atget, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Weston.

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) and Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1989) are well known for significant work in portraiture and self-portraiture that challenged gender roles and notions of femininity, masculinity, and androgyny. This exciting and original book is the first to consider the two artists together, examining the powerful portraits they created during the vibrant and tumultuous era bookended by the Stonewall riots and the AIDS crisis. Several important bodies of work are featured, including Warhol’s Ladies and Gentlemen series of drag queen portraits and his collaboration with Christopher Makos on Altered Image, in which Warhol was photographed in makeup and wigs, and Mapplethorpe’s photographs of Patti Smith and of female body builder Lisa Lyon.

The major retrospective of Robert Mapplethorpe's work that the J. Paul Getty Museum and Los Angeles County Museum of Art promised four years ago when they jointly acquired some 2,000 images by the New York City photographer is set to open in 2016 in an exhibition at both museums.

The Getty's part will run March 15 to July 31, 2016; the LACMA dates are March 20 to July 31, 2016, the two museums announced Thursday. The co-curators are Paul Martineau of the Getty and LACMA's Britt Salvesen.

Three of Andy Warhol's most iconic portraits from the 1980s will go to auction at Bonhams in London on February 12 at the Post-War & Contemporary Art sale. Each depicts a person that was a close friend of the artist as well as an important figure of the decade: socialite Marjorie Copley, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, and artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.

"Portrait of Marjorie Copley" (1980), an icy, demure departure from the bright Pop colors that largely dominated Warhol's work during this period, has been given an estimate of £180,000–£250,000 ($271,743–$377,421).

It may come as no surprise that when you ask Americans to choose their favorite artwork, Edward Hopper’s iconic “Nighthawks” sits at the top of the list. For the Art Everywhere US initiative (imported from the UK), online voters picked Hopper’s 1942 noir masterpiece and 57 other works from a curated selection of 100 pieces from the collections of five museums — the Art Institute of Chicago, the Dallas Museum of Art, LACMA, the National Gallery of Art, and the Whitney. Starting August 4, the works will adorn as many as 50,000 billboards and signs across America.

The works to go on view range from patriotic picks like Gilbert Stuart’s 1821 portrait of George Washington and Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” to more contemporary choices like photographs from Robert Mapplethorpe and Cindy Sherman. As part of a special presentation at the annual meeting of the United States Conference of Mayors, Art Everywhere will present the full list of works.

Maine philanthropists, Owen and Anna Wells, have donated their impressive photography collection to the Portland Museum of Art. The gift includes works by Robert Mapplethorpe, Ansel Adams, William Wegman and Berenice Abbott. 45 photographs from the Wells’ collection will go on view on December 21, 2013 as part of the exhibition American Vision: Photographs from the Collection of Owen and Anna Wells.

Owen Wells, Vice Chairman of the philanthropic Libra Foundation, and his wife, Anna, President of the Portland Museum’s Board of Trustees, began collecting photography in the 1990s. The couple initially gravitated towards American artists with ties to Maine, but their collection has grown to include some of the most well-known photographers of the 20th century. The Wells’ collection spans more than eight decades and includes landscapes, portraits and scenes of everyday life.   

American Vision: Photographs from the Collection of Owen and Anna Wells will be on view at the Portland Museum of Art through February 23, 2014. 

News of a museum's major art acquisition isn't usually accompanied by the question, "Why?" So it's interesting to see it crop up in reports that a huge cache of Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs, plus his archives and youthful mixed-media art, has been jointly acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Trust.

The specific gist of the puzzlement seems to be: Why Los Angeles?

Mapplethorpe was born in Floral Park, Queens, and spent his entire working life in New York (he died there at 42 in 1989). Although the only time I met him was at a dinner party in Pasadena, he didn't have much connection with Southern California.

Yet, since when is an artist's studio zip-code a ruling criterion for art museums with encyclopedic collections such as LACMA and the Getty? The puzzlement recalls an infamous column written by a New York critic 20 years ago when the Getty bought James Ensor's magnificent "Christ's Entry Into Brussels in 1889," claiming the signal Expressionist masterpiece really "belonged in Europe." Apparently the critic hadn't spent much time at his local Metropolitan and Museum of Modern Art.