Leatherboy And Angel in One

By Richard Lacayo

The volume of his photographs that Robert Mapplethorpe published three years ago carried self-portraits on both front and back. There he was on one cover in a black leather jacket, sporting an updated biker haircut, with a cigarette dangling from his lips. It was the Mapplethorpe of whips and sexual appliances, the one who had careered into the art world in the late 1970s with images of homosexual sadomasochism. But on the back cover he offered a different version of himself, bare chested and slender, in pale makeup: the artist as breakable cherub, with a whiff of androgyny and maybe a hint of Pierrot, the pantomime clown. Perhaps it was this Mapplethorpe who made his other pictures, the voluptuous orchids, the portrait faces glowing like bulbs in the dark, the riveting nudes.

Of those two self-portraits, only the second is in the retrospective of Mapplethorpe's work currently on view at Manhattan's Whitney Museum of American Art. But both spirits, the dark leatherboy and the angel of light, preside jointly in most of the 111 works on display. The obsessions with sex and death that are palpable in his scenes of heavy leather are still visible in the phallic tumescence and mortal shadows of Calla Lily, 1984. The straightforward but unreal quality of the S-M images is there again in his portrait of Ken Moody and Robert Sherman, 1984 -- two hairless heads, one black, one white, an uncanny feeling built from blunt facts. After a while, even the taut compositions of Mapplethorpe's portraits start to look like another form of bondage.

At 41, Mapplethorpe has been one of the most visible photographers of his generation for a decade, but this year is a high-water mark in his career. The Whitney retrospective, which runs through Oct. 23, is his first one-man show at a major American museum in years. And in December, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia will open a somewhat larger Mapplethorpe exhibition that will travel to Chicago, Boston and Washington. With the era of sexual extremity now closed, some of Mapplethorpe's pictures look even more loaded and unnerving than they once did. But the durable qualities of his work are also appearing in clearer relief.

For Mapplethorpe, the camera is mostly just a device for distilling images that correspond to his obsessions. Some of the earliest pictures in the show, made soon after he finished studying art at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1970, are images simply torn from magazines and reworked. Others are Polaroids of himself or Rock Singer Patti Smith, for years his muse, companion and fellow traveler through the New York City avant-garde.

That early work is interesting but tentative. The real Mapplethorpe is the one who arrived on the scene suddenly in 1977 with three Manhattan gallery shows. One was devoted solely to his S-M imagery, pictures that brought him quick notoriety. They were affronting but memorable, and hard to pigeonhole. At first glance they were in the venerable photographic tradition of scenes brought back from exotic territory, like 19th century portraits of Indians in full headdress. But the people in them were not foreign to Mapplethorpe. They were his friends and sexual playmates. If this was documentary, it was from the inside looking out.

Those pictures also brought to Mapplethorpe's basically conservative style the electrical charge of the forbidden. Take that away, and it becomes easier to see that he has a classicist's taste for the symmetrical, the serene, the perfected, the imperishable. But against it he plays a romantic's fascination with forceful material that classical form cannot digest. In his male nudes, mostly of black men, the genitals present themselves with a frankness that explodes the composition. In his pictures of female Body Builder Lisa Lyon, the photographic conventions that ordinarily apply to the male anatomy -- flexed muscles, sculptural lighting -- are used to confound every expectation of female form. A picture like Thomas, 1986, a variation on Leonardo's image of a man inscribed within a circle, could be an emblem of Mapplethorpe's work: vital force straining against formal bounds.

Mapplethorpe's imagery comes trailing a long pedigree, from the Yellow Book decadence of Aubrey Beardsley to Edward Weston's peppers, from Cocteau's classical echoes and erotomania to the chiseled male nudes shot by George Platt Lynes in the '30s and '40s. It also indulges a fascination with style and surface that is very much of the present. Mapplethorpe trafficked expertly in the prevailing moods of the '70s and early '80s, the appetite for both glamour and decadence, high fashion and subterranean sex. That has caused him to be dismissed at times as a vendor of deluxe fantasy. But if his work has sometimes been complicit with the indulgences of the day, it was never fully in service to them. He never aimed for the lugubrious swank of Helmut Newton, whose corseted women can look like sale goods in a fancy furniture store. He never settled for the sexual salesmanship of Bruce Weber, whose boys live in a world made of equal parts Ralph Lauren and Leni Riefenstahl.

The Whitney show takes on a special poignance from the fact that Mapplethorpe is now in the midst of a debilitating struggle with AIDS; that the show contains so much work produced in the past year is a tribute to his powers. But boundless drive has always been at the root of his work. His imagery bears the stamp of passion, an aesthete's passion, even in a century in which beauty has an uncertain status as a basis for art. Mapplethorpe does not care; he is a true believer. The poet Czeslaw Milosz, musing on the visible world, once wrote, "Out of reluctant matter/ What can be gathered? Nothing, beauty at best." Mapplethorpe might agree, but he would add that beauty seems like magnificent compensation.