Pistils

Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Individual Artists

Pistils Details

From Library Journal Though Mapplethorpe (1946-89) may figure in the public consciousness for his controversial X Portfolio, his strong reputation in art circles is grounded on his stark formalism, his celebrity portraits, and his photographs of flowers. Indeed, the flowers consistently outpace all his other works at the annual auctions. This third volume in Random House's collaboration with the Mapplethorpe Foundation (after Mapplethorpe, 1990, and Altars, LJ 2/1/96) conveys the luminosity and seductive beauty of 120 of Mapplethorpe's creations in amazingly rich reproductions. A short but insightful essay by poet Ashbery delves into the artist's uneasy relation to his floral subjects and places them within his greater oeuvre. Mapplethorpe photographed flowers throughout his career, and the images here represent all periods and styles, including color and toned prints. The book's only drawback is the editors' choice to present the pictures out of chronological order, forcing the reader to flip back and forth to discern shifts in the artist's manipulations of light and depth. Still, with twice as many illustrations as Bulfinch's Flowers (LJ 12/90), which showed only color works, this sumptuous book belongs in all academic and most larger public libraries.?Eric Bryant, "Library Journal"Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. Read more From the Inside Flap ethorpe began taking photographs in the 1970s with a Polaroid camera given to him by a friend. When he died in 1989 of AIDS, at the age of forty-two, he was considered one of the most important photographers of his generation, having gained a reputation as the avatar of a rigorous formalism stunningly wed to graphic and sometimes controversial subject matter.

Most of Robert Mapplethorpe's days began in the early afternoon, often by photographing flowers. Mapplethorpe used them to help focus his vision, centering and warming up for his commercial portrait work. The flowers also helped him to effect the transition to the more daring work, which he executed late at night.

Pistils reproduces 120 of these ravishing images of flowers, many of which have never been published. The full range of Mapplethorpe's virtuosity is displayed here--early Polaroids: exacting still lifes in black-and-white and color; and extremely rare, toned gravure prints. Not since Georgia O'Keef Read more See all Editorial Reviews

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