Why Mapplethorpe’s Photographs Remain Subversive
Jackson Arn, Artsy
January 2019
Leon Trotsky wrote that the novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline entered the canon as effortlessly as other men enter their homes. The photographer Robert Mapplethorpe preferred to lob bricks through the windows—it wasn’t always clear if he was trying to go inside or tear the place down. In 1989, the year he succumbed to AIDS, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., canceled an exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s work that included photographs of anal-fisting and naked children. […]