Robert Mapplethorpe’s Flowers of Romanticism and Rage
Robin Lane Fox, Financial Times
June 2022
How long should cut flowers last? A week? Three? My view of them has been widened by an unusual show that has been pulling in visitors in Sarasota, Florida. There, the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens is presenting works by the master photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and his fellow American muse, the singer, poet and artist Patti Smith. The show is themed round flowers, light and poetry and runs until June 26.
‘The romantic garden within him’, Smith once wrote in a tribute to Mapplethorpe, ‘raged with wild bloom which he plucked and carelessly tossed in every direction’. That bloom was not exactly horticultural. As she emphasised, Mapplethorpe ‘was no naturalist [ . . . ] art, not nature, moved him.’ His best-known images are his portraits, including ones of Smith: ‘with you’, he told her, ‘I can’t miss’. Others are of sexual practices and contortions that he himself classed as X and exhibited in a glass case only for viewers over the age of 18. […]