Robert Mapplethorpe

Sotheby's London, 20 May 2010, Sale 10430, Lot 56

Private collection

Sotheby's Paris, 14 November 2014, Sale 1420, Lot 117

Robert Mapplethorpe, Certain People: A Book of Portraits (Pasadena, 1985), p. 16

Robert Mapplethorpe, Black Book (New York, 1986), p. 28

Mapplethorpe (Lausanne: FAE, Musée d'Art Contemporain, 1991), cover

Arthur C. Danto, Mapplethorpe (New York, 1992), p. 183

Arkady Ippolitov, Jennifer Blessing and Germano Celant, Robert Mapplethorpe and the Classical Tradition (Berlin: Deutsche Guggenheim, 2004), pl. 113

Paul Martineau and Britt Salvesen, Robert Mapplethorpe: The Photographs (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2016), pl. 118

Robert Mapplethorpe began working with photography in 1971, when he was given a Polaroid camera by the artist and filmmaker Sandy Daley. Photography quickly became his medium of choice, and he had his first solo photographic show in 1973: an exhibition of Polaroids at Light Gallery. By the early 1970s, Mapplethorpe had begun to address the themes that he would continue to explore throughout his career: homosexuality, eroticism, transgression, flowers, and portraits. During this period he also refined his craft and approach. While multiple-image compositions and mixed media tended to dominate the work of the early 1970s, by the end of the decade Mapplethorpe had begun to concentrate upon single, stand-alone images. By the early 1980s, he had largely moved past the shock effects of his sadomasochistic imagery and embarked upon a more nuanced photographic investigation of eroticism and homosexuality. It is during this time that we begin to see the emergence of the Mapplethorpe aesthetic, and Donald Cann is exemplary of Mapplethorpe’s new approach.

Around the same time, Mapplethorpe had become increasingly drawn to exploring the black male body through photography. He captured various men he encountered in New York, including Milton Moore, Donald Cann and Charles Edward Bowman (see Lot 3). The present photograph is one of the few images in which the subject looks straight into the camera. The meticulous composition of Cann, bathed in dramatic light, has all the hallmarks of Mapplethorpe’s mature style.