In some artists creativity is strongly intertwined with lived experience, while in others the autobiographical component is less influential. Robert Mapplethorpe certainly belongs to the first category, whose photographic production is connected to a life that became, in its final decade, very cruel, and to a personal biography that turns social. The viewer thus finds, when faced with his photographs, that they cannot help but feel the artist’s lived experience, crossing it with the images, even when – and these are the majority – the images have a tone distant from and opposite to existential pain. A lived experience that unfolds, both in real life and in photography, when one also considers the circles Mapplethorpe moved in, the cultural humus in which he grew and established himself. Elements that the retrospective currently underway at Palazzo Reale in Milan, curated by Denis Curti, in collaboration with and with a catalogue by Marsilio Arte, conveys very well, accompanying the visitor with a highly engaging installation and interpretive apparatus.
Robert Mapplethorpe, “Le forme del desiderio”, installation view at Palazzo Reale Milano, ph. Andrea-Avezzù, courtesy Palazzo Reale Milano
The second act of a trilogy that has already stopped at Stanze della fotografia in Venice, and will continue in Rome, “Le forme del desiderio” (The Forms of Desire ) is a journey whose title illuminates a large part of the works on display. Divided into seven thematic and stylistic chapters, the exhibition exalts Mapplethorpe’s art transferred into and fused with his life, with the people he frequented (many), those he deeply loved (some), and himself (multifaceted). The desire of the title is the driving force underlying the photographer’s artistic career and, therefore, the photographs on display as well, visible between the opposites of its most authentically loving affective expression (with his muses Patti Smith and Lisa Lyon, for instance) and the artistic nudes inspired by classical sculptural forms.
Robert Mapplethorpe, “Collage, Untitled”, 1968 © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission, courtesy Palazzo Reale Milano
The first section of the exhibition is an anthology of collages: we are around 1970, and Mapplethorpe selects newspaper cuttings, archival material, humble materials, garments, and religious objects to create a sort of personal pantheon of artifice. We are confronted with the imminent photographer’s desire to show fragments of his own identity, without unsettling the viewer or creating a sensational scandal. Standing out among the works displayed in this phase of the exhibition is “White Carpet Cross”, a late non-collage and unique piece from 1983, depicting a cross made of white carpet, emblematic of the religious humus in which the artist grew up. In 1975 Robert Mapplethorpe is in a penthouse in Greenwich Village, New York, and photographs an American rocker who has yet to make her name and who is called Patti Smith. The image will end up on the cover of the musician’s first record, “Horses”, and portrays her in an androgynous mode. Nothing irreverent – just one of the many personal takes by the photographer on the woman who will be one of his muses and closest friends throughout his life. The second section of the exhibition is dedicated to the Chicago-born musician, depicted in very intimate poses: as a priestess, in a black tie over a white shirt, in a managerial guise, in a new age pose. Many facets that, taken together, compose a highly engaging visual album.
Robert Mapplethorpe, “Patti Smith”, 1986 © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission, courtesy Palazzo Reale Milano
Another muse who reigns in Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographic imagery is bodybuilding champion Lisa Lyon. Let it be clear to the reader that Lyon is far from the ideal of female bodybuilding we are accustomed to today: the woman photographed with such relational closeness by Mapplethorpe is ambiguous, almost androgynous, delicate and statuesque at the same time. The photographs portray the photographer’s muse sometimes luminous in classical nudity, sometimes steeped in a glamorous aura: between these two poles oscillates the photographic series occupying the third chapter of the exhibition, arousing in the viewer conflicting feelings, suspended between feminine grace and a tendency toward kitsch extremism. In a black-and-white photograph from 1980, a human being stares intensely into the lens: they wear lipstick, a smooth blush gleams, seductively pronounced dark circles under the eyes. It is the photographer portraying himself, and it is the most intense and compelling example in the section dedicated to Robert Mapplethorpe’s self-portraits. An emblem of the photographer’s personality, this image is literally surrounded by infinite variations the artist creates of himself: à la James Dean, crooner, macho, office worker, woman, gangster, street criminal, king on a throne. His desires and perversions are on display without filters; through the self-portrait flow the personalities and inner worlds that Mapplethorpe feels and lives on his own skin, down to the skin inexorably hollowed by illness (1988).
Robert Mapplethorpe, “Joanne Russale”, 1986 © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission, courtesy Palazzo Reale Milano
The “Portraits” section is the second largest in the exhibition. Photographic compositions emanating meticulousness and empathy pass before our eyes. Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography is also a connection with the photographed subject: from the late 1970s to the late 1980s, Mapplethorpe uses black and white, cloaking it in impeccable technique and a constant pursuit of formal and classical perfection. The direct and deep gaze of David Byrne, the luminous and magnetic one of Isabella Rossellini, the curious one of Yoko Ono, the almost mythological figure of Robert Wilson, the macho and highly erotic figure of Richard Gere, the cartoon-like gaze of Keith Haring are, for this writer, the finest pieces of this mosaic. It is particularly perceptible, when viewing these photographs, how fully the portrayed figures manage in every way to satisfy the photographer’s expectations, and this is one of the most evident results of Mapplethorpe’s photographic research.
Robert Mapplethorpe, “Thomas”, 1987 © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission, courtesy Palazzo Reale Milano
An intensely chromatic poppy tilts toward the lower right of the visual scene: it is one of the few colour photographs on display and can truly stand as the metaphorical symbol – the decadence of life – of this retrospective on a photographer who watched his own body yield to illness. It can be admired in the chapter dedicated to “Nudes and Flowers”, the largest in the exhibition. Human figures in statuesque poses – a striking James Deitz from 1983 above all – calla lilies, snapdragons, orchids and poppies are the protagonists of this immersion in a stylistic perfection of the highest quality and great engagement. Our gaze lingers not only on the overall photographic subject, but also on the single perfect detail, in an intensely erotic light that challenges our mental taboos and intellectual constructions. Everything pulses, from the black-and-white bodies to the female and male ones, from the flowers that magnetize in their still-life poses to the human poses that interweave myth, dance, sensuality, desire.
Robert Mapplethorpe, “Le forme del desiderio”, installation view at Palazzo Reale Milano, ph. Andrea-Avezzù, courtesy Palazzo Reale Milano
The apex of the encounter between form and figure is found in the final chapter of the exhibition, entitled “Statues and Nudes”. For a photographer who has always sought formal perfection in the many human figures portrayed, a significant passage through the world of classical statuary, set in dialogue with the human body, could not be absent. The clearest outcome of this thematic series is the life that Mapplethorpe manages to give to the statues, which have also become sentient and fragile, as a human body can be. The photographer’s Hasselblad 500C succeeds in removing immobility from these ancient works of ingenuity and restoring to us their softness and transience. Beyond the already mentioned substantial Marsilio Arte catalogue, in the exhibition we can linger over a series of display cases containing censored and uncensored magazines, the cassette tapes of “Horses” and “Easter” by Patti Smith, the poems of Arthur Rimbaud, handwritten letters, and above all the reproduction of a banana attached to a set of keys that anticipates by several decades that of Maurizio Cattelan.
Info:
Robert Mapplethorpe. Le forme del desiderio
19/01/2026 – 17/05/2026
Palazzo Reale Milano
Piazza del Duomo, 12 – Milano
www.palazzorealemilano.it
I am Giovanni Crotti, born in 1968, and I feel obliged to thank writing because it drives my life. I cultivate within me multitudes that lead me to investigate, know, and deepen every cultural and creative expression, and then write about it, always trying to be clear and documented in the contents.
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