Robert Mapplethorpe

Certain People: A Book of Portraits (Pasadena, 1985), rear dust jacket

Richard Marshall, ed., Robert Mapplethorpe (New York, 1990), p. 205

Mark Holborn and Dimitri Levas, Mapplethorpe (London, 1995), p. 44

Germano Celant, Robert Mapplethorpe: Tra antico e moderno: Un' antologia (Turin: Palazzo della Promotrice, 2006), p. 175

Germano Celant, Mapplethorpe: The Nymph Photography (Milan, 2014), p. 189

Using his own body to manifest both ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ characteristics, Robert Mapplethorpe’s Self Portrait, Drag playfully skewers binary conceptions of gender. Wearing makeup (including heavy foundation, cat-eye shaped eyeshadow and glossy lipstick) and curling his hair into voluminous waves, his face embodies the stereotypically feminine, while the angularity of his nude torso reads as masculine.

In contrast to Mapplethorpe’s sexually graphic images, created earlier in the 1970s, this quiet, frontal self-portrait is a softer, gentler glimpse into the photographer’s complex relationship with his own sexuality and identity, taken at the beginning of a period where he would shift focus to figural studies that reference Greco-Roman sculpture. Black and white photography proved to be the perfect medium to employ during this period, allowing him to achieve richly tonal prints while referencing the marble employed in Classical sculpture. Indeed, in the present image, Mapplethorpe appears almost as a marble bust on a pedestal, removed from the rest of his body and frozen in time.

Another print of Self-Portrait, Drag is in the permanent collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Prints of this powerful image rarely appear at auction. Only two examples have come to market in the last twenty-five years.