Robert Mapplethorpe’s Proud Finale
Dominick Dunne, Vanity Fair
February 1989
No one expected him to live for the opening, and there he was, on a high,” said Tom Armstrong, the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Whether the artist would or would not be present was the question that occupied the minds of all the people involved, in the days preceding the highly publicized and eagerly anticipated vernissage of the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, the photographer who took his art to the outer limits of his own personal sexual experience, at the Whitney last July. […]