Robert Mapplethorpe

platinum print, signed, dated, and numbered '2/3' in the margin, the copyright stamp, signed and dated, on the reverse, in a frame designed to the photographer's specifications, a Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, label on the reverse, 1983, printed in 1985, no. 2 in an edition of 3 in platinum

Richard Marshall, et al., Robert Mapplethorpe (Whitney Museum of American Art, 1988, in conjunction with the exhibition), p. 121

Arthur C. Danto, Mapplethorpe (New York, 1992), p. 5

This print, on sturdy, lightly textured paper with a deckled edge, is in generally excellent condition.
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The Coral Sea, Robert Mapplethorpe's photograph of the eponymous aircraft carrier, is one of the few iconic images in the photographer's oeuvre that falls outside of the genres for which he is known.  Yet, like his picture of the tattered American flag, it is unmistakably a Mapplethorpe.  The photograph is named for the Midway-class aircraft carrier, commissioned by the United States Navy in 1947, shown in the picture.  The carrier saw active duty in the Atlantic, Pacific, Mediterranean, and Persian Gulf before it was decommissioned in 1990 and dismantled. 

The Coral Sea was among the first of Mapplethorpe's photographs to be printed in platinum, and is one of only 3 prints of the image rendered in the medium.  Mapplethorpe began experimenting with alternative printing processes around 1985 in an effort to get beyond the look and feel of conventional gelatin silver prints.  His preoccupation with the object-quality of his photographs had, up to that point, led him to experiment with fabric mats and elaborate custom framing.  By rendering prints in the more tactile platinum process, Mapplethorpe hoped to transcend the medium – to make the image, as he said, 'no longer a photograph first, [but] firstly a statement that happens to be a photograph.'

Mapplethorpe's darkroom, manned since 1979 by master-printer Tom Baril (see Lot 181), was not equipped for the specialized and labor-intensive craft of platinum printing.   Mapplethorpe turned to expert platinum printer Martin Axon, and discussed with him what he hoped to achieve in this new series of prints in the medium.  Axon recalls that after Mapplethorpe had chosen a group of images to be attempted in platinum, he would examine them carefully and discuss with Mapplethorpe and Baril how each should be rendered in platinum, the overall tonality of the image, what to emphasize or de-emphasize in the composition, and what choice of paper would be most appropriate.   

In many ways The Coral Sea was an ideal image to be rendered in the platinum medium, which is known for its extremely wide range of gray tones.  The expansive gray sky – so crucial to the composition – could have become, in the hands of a less skilled printer, an overwhelming leaden field.  In the present print, however, the sky has a diaphanous, almost pointillist quality.  Axon took special care to ensure that the white '43' on the ship was accentuated in the image to just the right extent. 

Mapplethorpe's photograph of The Coral Sea served as the central motif for Patti Smith's book-length prose poem of the same title, published in 1996, which was a dream-like elegy on the photographer's life.  In 2005 and 2006 Smith, with guitarist Kevin Shields, transformed the work into a multimedia event.  Their two performances of The Coral Sea at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall have recently been released on CD. 

Sotheby's thanks Martin Axon for his assistance in researching this photograph and for sharing the transcript of his 1986 interview with Mapplethorpe. 

 

Complete cataloguing for this lot is as follows:

platinum print, signed, dated, and numbered '2/3' by the photographer in pencil in the margin, the photographer's copyright stamp, signed and dated by him in pencil, on the reverse, in a frame designed to the photographer's specifications, a Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, label on the reverse, 1983, printed in 1985, no. 2 in an edition of 3 in platinum