“Polaroids: Mapplethorpe”

Untitled (Marianne Faithful)

Photograph: Robert Mapplethorpe foundation, collection of the solomon Guggenheim Museum, New York, gift of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

A pack of Kools and a book of matches lie on a table; a bouquet of flowers rests on a pillow; a blindfolded man stands handcuffed and roped to a chain dangling from a loft ceiling—these are just some of Robert Mapplethorpe’s small black-and-white Polaroids on view, many of which have never been exhibited. Created between 1970 and 1975, when the artist was in his late twenties, they reveal the development of an eye that couldn’t help but eroticize everything in its path, a tendency we are most familiar with through his later, mannered portraits of nude men and flowers. Here, as in that work, the poses are languid, gentle, and suffused with a frisson not entirely explained by the fluid and rapid Polaroid process.

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Photographs: © Robert Mapplethorpe foundation, private collection

In contrast to Mapplethorpe’s later work, the 100 Impressionistic Polaroids gathered here are restless and frisky. Yet in them, we observe the artist patiently working out his elegant lighting, aesthetics and composition. He was a skilled technician with a wide range of affinities: His taste for classicism and for perversity tinged with Catholicism recalls Andy Warhol, Derek Jarman and the obscure French Surrealist Pierre Molinier; his close cropping and sensualization of the quotidian conjure Edward Weston.

The only flaw in the show is that Mapplethorpe’s edgiest BDSM photographs appear only in the catalog. Part of the genius of his oeuvre is the stylistically seamless integration of kink, which he makes look at home next to, say, Helen Marden’s bats or a celebrity portrait. It becomes salacious when segregated.