Lowell Smith
About this artwork
This is a beautiful example of the way that Mapplethorpe would often photograph the human body, or parts of it, against a geometrical, abstract background. The white board is viewed at a 90-degree angle so that it appears only as surface, as a white rectangle. There is little sense of depth, so that the man’s hands and arm stand out in contrast. Mapplethorpe may have been inspired to do this and other close-ups of parts of the body by the photographs that Alfred Stieglitz took of Georgia O’Keeffe’s hands around 1918-20 or that Man Ray took of Meret Oppenheim’s inked arm and hand in 1933.
Updated before 2020
see media-
artist:Robert Mapplethorpe (1946 - 1989) American
-
title:Lowell Smith
-
date created:1981
-
materials:Gelatin silver print on paper
-
measurements:35.30 x 35.50 cm (framed: 60.50 x 58.60 x 3,5 cm)
-
object type:
-
credit line:ARTIST ROOMS National Galleries of Scotland and Tate. Acquired jointly through The d'Offay Donation with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and Art Fund, 2008
-
accession number:AR00161
-
gallery:
-
artwork photographed by:Antonia Reeve
Robert Mapplethorpe
Robert Mapplethorpe
The American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe became famous, not to say, notorious, in the 1970s and 1980s for his photographs of the male nude and sexually explicit, gay imagery. Although often considered controversial, Mapplethorpe tested the right to individual freedom of expression. These...