Grand Palais hosts Robert Mapplethorpe's major exhibition

PARIS - Over 250 works represent a huge retrospective for Robert Mapplethorpe, during this exhibition, held in Grand Palais. His entire career as a photographer will be revealed, including the Polaroids of the early 1970s and portraits from the late 1980s.

He puts a big accent on his two muses, Patti Smith and Lisa Lyon, to explore the theme of women and femininity, in a genuine discovery of his style.  Robert Mapplethorpe is a great classical artist. In a way it was photography that chose him, than the other way around.

Earlier decades, during an interview, he said: “If I had been born one hundred or two hundred years ago, I might have been a sculptor, but photography is a very quick way to see, to make a sculpture. Lisa Lyon reminded me of Michelangelo’s subjects, because he did muscular women”.

Robert Mapplethorpe is a sculptor at heart, obsessed by the search for perfect form. He wanted to be “a creator of images” more than a photographer, “a poet” rather than a documentarist. Mapplethorpe was an artist before becoming a photographer. His images come from a pictorial culture in which we find Titian (The Flaying of Marsyas / Dominick and Elliot), David, Dali, and even Michelangelo!

The artist always said he used photography to make sculptures, so he combined the two arts.

In parallel with this, the musée Rodin is organising a Mapplethorpe-Rodin exhibition, from 8 April to 21 September 2014.