THE HYPE, legend and voluminous commentary about the late Robert Mapplethorpe seem almost to have swallowed up the talented photographer, or at least have made difficult any reasonably cleareyed look at him. It is hard to remember any such posthumous cult since the days of James Dean (whom, incidentally, Mapplethorpe rather resembles in some of his self portraits), or Jackson Pollock.
The Gallery of Photography is showing his work in two stages, the first of which ends on January 4th and the second opens two days later. Mapplethorpe's beginnings were not notable - a handful of early works shows him trying his hand at collage, at rather hackneyed montage effects and even at painting, alter a fashion. However, he soon got sucked into the vortex of the New York gay scene, which was still vibrant and talented though already showing tokens of a narcissistic love affair with itself.
Mapplethorpe's early photographs certainly reflect this narcissism, and they also belong largely to the area of magazine photographs which is at once "arty" and quasi pornographic in a chic, offhand, acceptable way. The "cool" tone, the High Tech quality so typical of the 1970s, the deadpan level gazes, the emotional detachment, are all predictably present. The stress on outsize black penises seems to me to grow repetitive, even rather tedious (though I am fully aware that those whose sexual tastes are different may not find them such). But from the start he had Style, a clean cut, economic, even elegant one, he was in tune with his age and milieu, and above all he had an almost classical instinct for posing the naked male body, either full length or in detail. These male nudes are, in fact, sometimes extremely beautiful and without the deliberate emotional coldness which is sometimes intrusive in other subject matter.
Mapplethorpe, in spite of his narcissism, could also be an excellent portrait photographer, both of women and men, even if those of certain "celebrities" are pretty much what any competent society quasi-hack might produce. It is a relief and a change to see the artist Cindy Sherman as caught by his camera, rather than by her own and the 1986 portrait of the aged de Kooning is a masterpiece.
A series of photos of Patti Smith varies from softly veiled intimacy to hard impersonality, and it shows how Mapplethorpe mastered a whole range of light effects and could vary his sense of focus. He also played skilfully with scale, some of the outsize heads being particularly effective.
The much reproduced flower pieces are pretty much as they look in book form, but on one of the landings there is a large, and quite superb, Irises. The 1987 back view of a seated, splay legged Negro, entitled Carlion, is equally good, but perhaps the peak of the exhibition is the small room which holds a series of close up studies of a black male model, usually sitting, called Ajitto. In works such as these, Mapplethorpe was creating a new, contemporary form of neo classicism.