ART REVIEW : Mapplethorpe: A Chiseler of Sculptural Images Into Photos

The sculptural subjects of photographs made during the last year of Robert Mapplethorpe’s life bear little resemblance to the insignificant neoclassical statuary that hangs around his New York loft waiting to be auctioned for a few thousand dollars apiece at Christie’s Oct. 31 sale of his collection.

Cropped, enlarged and elegantly dramatized in sharp black-and-white, these anonymously made marbles and bronzes take on such a commanding human presence in Mapplethorpe’s 20x24-inch gelatin silverprints that one viewer at the opening of BlumHelman’s current show wondered aloud how the artist made people look so much like sculpture.

The photographed male nudes don’t correspond to current ideas of what’s lifelike, however. Except for “Black Bust,” depicting an intense, self-contained young man, most of the pictures portray classical ideals of beauty and mythological themes. The sculptures’ “life” is largely a matter of poses, gestures and physical attributes. A fallen “Icarus,” for example, has collapsed on a couch in a perfect arrangement of youthful vulnerability; a horned “Italian Devil” plays his evil part with gusto, and a “Wrestler” is suitably muscular if far too pretty and languid to survive in the ring.

“Skull Walking Cane,” presenting the ghoulish head of a cane that the frail artist took to his Whitney Museum opening last July and posed with in a self-portrait, brings the viewer back to the real world in which flesh withers and AIDS is a frightening killer.

For this group of pictures, Mapplethorpe picked up on a 19th-Century practice of photographing artworks, but bent the tradition to his designer’s sensibility and heightened the quotient of desire. In that sense, these photographs illustrate Mapplethorpe’s major strength and weakness: his vision. He was essentially a fashion photographer who had a perfectionist’s compulsion to make everything equally stylish and alluring, whether it be a flower, a statue or an act of sexual violence. (BlumHelman Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, to Aug. 5.)