SFMOMA, Part 31: Floor 4, Ways of Seeing: Fourteen Artists.
The most beautiful man in the room is forty inches square, and he is not smiling.
Robert Mapplethorpe stares out of the canvas with the composure of a Renaissance prince — symmetrical face, strong nose, mouth set in a line that could be arrogance or could be grief. Warhol has rendered him in his late style: the photographic image broken into a silkscreen, the tones flattened, the background a field of dark color that makes the face float like a coin on black velvet. It is a small painting by Warhol's standards — forty inches, almost square, the size of a large mirror — and it has the stillness of an icon. Which is fitting, because both men in this exchange were in the business of manufacturing icons, and both knew the other one knew.
Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, 1983 — acrylic paint and silkscreen ink on linen, 40 1/4 × 40 in. (102.4 × 101.6 cm). The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at SFMOMA. On view on Floor 4 in Ways of Seeing: Fourteen Artists, part of Reimagined: The Fisher Collection at 10. Entry included with general admission (SFMOMA, 151 Third Street; Mon–Tue 10–5, Wed closed, Thu 12–8, Fri–Sun 10–5).
The easy reading is: late Warhol, society portrait, another famous face run through the machine. But the subject is sharper than that. In 1983, Mapplethorpe photographed Warhol — the famous gelatin silver portrait, Warhol's face half-lost in shadow, a cross of darkness falling across it like a veil. And Warhol, in return, silkscreened Mapplethorpe. Two men, each the most deliberate image-maker of his scene, each turning the other into an image. This painting is half of a handshake.
1983: The exchange
By 1983 Warhol's portrait practice was an industry. The drill was well established: the sitter came to the Factory, Warhol shot Polaroids — dozens, sometimes hundreds — selected the one with the right blankness, had it silkscreened onto canvas, and painted in the background and the cosmetic color. The portraits were commissions, openly commercial, and Warhol was unembarrassed about it: "business art," he called it, the step after art.
Mapplethorpe's practice was the photographic mirror of Warhol's. Where Warhol took photographs and turned them into paintings, Mapplethorpe took the classical tradition — the portrait bust, the still life, the idealized nude — and turned it into photographs so formally perfect they looked carved. Both men understood the same secret: that in late-twentieth-century America, the image was the person, and controlling the image was the whole game.
So the 1983 exchange has the charge of a duel between equals. Mapplethorpe's portrait of Warhol is dark, severe, almost a death mask made while the subject was alive — Warhol's face emerging from blackness, the famous wig barely holding its shape. Warhol's portrait of Mapplethorpe answers with the opposite strategy: not darkness but flatness, not shadow but surface. Mapplethorpe gave Warhol gravity. Warhol gave Mapplethorpe glamour. Each man portrayed the other in the language the other couldn't speak.
The Polaroid sitting
Every Warhol portrait of this era began as a Polaroid session, and the sessions were performances in themselves. Warhol with his Big Shot camera, directing the sitter — chin up, no smile, look at the lens — shooting frame after frame until the face emptied out into the particular blankness he wanted. The blankness was the point. Warhol didn't want psychology; he wanted the mask, the public face, the version of the person that would survive reproduction.
Mapplethorpe, who spent his career hunting the perfect mask in his own sitters, must have recognized the game instantly. There is a particular irony in a photographer of Mapplethorpe's control submitting to Warhol's camera: he knew exactly what was being taken from him, and he gave it anyway. The resulting silkscreen — this painting — is Mapplethorpe as Warhol saw him, which is to say Mapplethorpe as an image first and a person second. The face is handsome the way a coin is handsome: stamped, legible, final.
1989: The ending neither of them painted
Mapplethorpe died on March 9, 1989, of complications from AIDS, at forty-two. Warhol had died two years earlier, in February 1987. The two portraits — Mapplethorpe's Warhol, Warhol's Mapplethorpe — outlived them both, and they now function as a matched set whether or not they hang together: each man preserved by the other's machine, each image testifying to a friendship that was also a professional recognition.
There is something almost unbearably 1980s about the pairing. Two gay men at the center of the New York art world, both obsessed with surface, both building images designed to outlast the body — working at the exact moment when bodies were proving terrifyingly un-outlastable. The portraits are cool and controlled and perfect, and they were made on the edge of a plague. The coolness wasn't shallowness. It was armor.
The show, again
Stand in front of the painting and notice how small it feels after the Elvises and the Marilyns — and how that smallness concentrates it. Forty inches square is the size of a face you could hold. The silkscreen grain is visible if you get close: the photograph breaking into dots, the dots breaking into paint. Mapplethorpe's eyes are the sharpest thing in the picture, and they don't quite meet yours; they look past you, the way his own sitters looked past his camera.
Then remember the other half of the exchange, the Mapplethorpe photograph of Warhol — the shadowed face, the veil of darkness. Between the two images, the two men mapped the whole territory: surface and depth, glamour and gravity, the mask and the man. Neither portrait tells the truth. Together, they tell something better: that in 1983, in New York, two masters of the image looked at each other and saw the only person in the room who understood the job.
I stood there a long time. The beautiful man kept not smiling. That was the portrait, and the portrait was the point. 🌁
Timeline — Andy Warhol
1946 — Robert Mapplethorpe born, Floral Park, New York
1960s–70s — Warhol builds the silkscreen portrait practice; Mapplethorpe builds the classical photographic portrait
1983 — Mapplethorpe photographs Warhol (gelatin silver print); Warhol silkscreens Mapplethorpe — the mutual portraits
1987 — Warhol dies, February 22, New York, age 58
1989 — Mapplethorpe dies, March 9, Boston, of AIDS complications, age 42
Today — Robert Mapplethorpe on view, 151 Third Street