Naked honesty in eye of beholder by Iain Gale
From the website: Mapplethorpe's roots lie with the Surrealists, in particular in the photographs of Hans Bellmer and Pierre Molinier, and if you want to understand his art you first have to embrace their viewpoint. The Surrealists believed sex was intrinsic to art. And they had a point. For more than 2,000 years, sex has been a central theme of artistic imagery. Mapplethorpe's penises may shock you, but they are nothing compared with the huge, erect phalluses which endow the bronze satyrs of ancient Greece. Think too of the excesses of Egon Schiele and Picasso.
Such dirty pretty things by Peter Conrad
From the website: On the Bowery I met Mapplethorpe's younger brother Edward, a deferential, soft-spoken man whose right to exist was challenged by Robert. 'He was 13 years older,' Edward told me, 'so I had very faint memories of him. He left the suburbs and moved into Manhattan soon after I was born. He came home reluctantly, if at all - though he did turn up when I graduated from my Catholic high school, looking like Brando as the biker in The Wild One.
Robert Mapplethorpe - Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art
More Mapplethorpe
