NEW YORK—
In her review of the Guggenheim's Mapplethorpe show in the New York Times, Roberta Smith writes the museum is leading its summer fare "with the smart, gorgeous and steamy 'Robert Mapplethorpe and the Classical Tradition: Photographs and Mannerist Prints.'"

In this exhibition, Mapplethorpe's photographs are paired with 16th-century Flemish Mannerist prints "which are often populated by extravagantly muscled men seen from all kinds of strange angles."

As Smith writes, "What we have here is highbrow, heavily credentialed beefcake lending historical context and precedent to one of the more controversial artists of our time, and it is great fun. It reminds us that Mapplethorpe didn't invent the eroticized male nude or simply make more explicit the undercurrents in the work of 19th- and 20th-century artists like Thomas Eakins and George Platt Lynes."

The show has been put together by Germano Celant, senior curator at the Guggenheim, and Arkady Ippolitiv, curator of Italian prints at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. There are 42 engravings and woodcuts from the Hermitage and 74 Mapplethorpe photographs out of the 194 that the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation gave the Guggenheim in 1992, after the artist died of AIDS at the age of 42.

The show, which opens today, runs through August 24.


FOR FULL STORY CLICK:

New York Times: "Mannerism and Mapplethorpe Muscles in Tight Embrace"

Guggenhiem Museuem Exbition
All images courtesy of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Images (top to bottom) Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Copyright State Hermitage Museum; Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Copyright Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Copyright 2005 State Hermitage Museum