Mapplethorpe

"Mapplethorpe" is a 1992 monograph with an essay by philosopher and critic Arthur C. Danto, prepared in collaboration with the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation in the years immediately after the photographer's death.

At 382 pages, the hardcover is one of the largest single collections of Mapplethorpe's photographs in print, moving from his early Polaroids and mixed-media constructions through the classical portraits, flower still lifes, and figure studies for which he became known, and including the explicit BDSM and nude photographs that made his 1989 traveling retrospective "The Perfect Moment" the subject of an obscenity trial in Cincinnati. Danto, then the art critic for The Nation, argues for reading Mapplethorpe's most controversial images within the same formal tradition as his flowers and portraits rather than apart from it. Random House published the first edition in 1992.

Mapplethorpe died of AIDS-related illness in March 1989, and this monograph was among the first large surveys of his work produced after his death, drawing on the archive maintained by the foundation he established to continue it.