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FIRST BLUSH: HOLLY SOLOMON DISCOVERS
ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE
Holly Solomon is the person who shifted Robert
Mapplethorpe’s world on its axis.
In 1977, the Holly Solomon Gallery launched Robert
Mapplethorpe in his first two distinguishing solo shows:
“Flowers” and “Portraits.” Within months, Holly Solomon
presented Robert in the group exhibit “Surrogates/Self-portraits.” In 1978, the Holly Solomon Gallery presented
Robert in “The New York Boat Show.” That same year,
1978, Robert’s work, christened by Holly Solomon, first
appeared in the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
This was also the first gallery to cancel his work, in July
1989, due to the pressures of some U.S. senators and some
religionists. In 1978, Robert was among ninety-five
photographers invited to show his work in the landmark
exhibition “Mirrors and Windows: Photography 1960 to the
Present,” at the Museum of Modern Art. “Mirrors and
Windows” was conceptualized by John Szarkowski, director
of the MOMA’s Department of Photography. Holly
Solomon had accomplished the prestigious launch on the
course she set for Robert Mapplethorpe.
JACK FRITSCHER: In the beginning, at the creation of
Mapplethorpe, you were there, as was I, silent witnesses,
unknown to each other and kept separate by Robert, who
excelled at keeping his various friends apart. Now that he’s
dead, my task is to restore the person who was Robert
Mapplethorpe. It is very much a detective story, as all of us
who knew him come out of our sadness to memorialize the
living, breathing Robert, who could fuck you over or not
with his shy smile that made him an expert at always getting
what he wanted.
HOLLY SOLOMON: I met him about the same time you
met him. Suddenly, he was in my life. Just as suddenly he
was gone. Ours was one of those 1970s art encounters. I was
showing the photographs of Eddie Shoustek, who
recommended that I meet Robert and see his work.
Immediately, when I looked at his portfolio, I had two major
responses. First, I was absolutely convinced that Robert was
an artist. Second, and this is a very important distinction, I
understood that Robert was not only a photographer; Robert
was an artist who was a photographer.
I studied his other work. His collages. His frames. He had
the passion of a daring young man. Also, I was taken by, and
felt very deeply about, that very young Robert’s conviction
that photography should be taken seriously as a fine art. He
was as eager as an evangelist about this new way to consider
photography.
Remember, that as late as the mid-seventies, photographs
as an art form were collected by enthusiasts who put them in
little plastic envelopes and stashed them away in drawers.
Before 1980, photography was considered a dubious art.
Photography was hardly felt to deserve the full power of
exhibition reserved for art.
JACK: And there stood Robert Mapplethorpe at the Gates of
Art.
HOLLY: Precisely. I felt Robert’s evangelism was his very
clever presentation of photographs in elegant, even over-elegant, frames that positioned the photographic work with
aesthetic power.
Other photographers, of course, had presented their work
as art, but Robert was determined to legitimize the camera
through a kind of aesthetic assault on the art establishment.
Robert thought gallery owners, critics, collectors, were
not as avant-garde as they thought, precisely because they
had overlooked photography as a legitimate art form. I
appreciated his evangelism. And, oh, he was charming,
warm and gentle. He was a very nice companion. I enjoyed
my relationship with Robert. It was a short and very happy
collaboration.
JACK: Weren’t you the first art professional to promote
him?
HOLLY: Yes. I believe we met in 1976.
JACK: That year, Robert appeared at your gallery in a group
show titled, “Animals.” He so wanted in that exhibition that
he photographed a dog, Dalmatian.
HOLLY: After that group show, I did two solo shows of
Robert. Both were distinctly one-artist exhibitions in 1977.
One was called “Flowers.” The other was “Portraits.” I
remember those two shows were really tough going.
JACK: Why? The critics? The public? Robert?
HOLLY: Listen, in the mid-seventies, to get any kind of
uptown audience downtown to SoHo was extremely
difficult.
JACK: SoHo, I remember from my experience, was first
pioneered by gay guys who found they could rent a loft
more cheaply than a Village apartment. That kind of
gentrification by gays, some of whom were artists, opened
the door to other artists and the first galleries.
HOLLY: First galleries. Yes. Remember when most people
wouldn’t cross Fifty-seventh Street to come downtown? I
was downtown by 1976, and established by 1977. I had been
showing Bill Wegman. Billy was at the gallery. I had other
artists who, like Robert, were artists working with
photographs. So as people came to look at their work, I’d
say to them about Robert, “I’ve got this other young artist.
You have to see his work.”
In that way, I was instrumental in getting Robert into
“Documenta 6” at the Museum Firdericianum in 1977. I
remember flying over to West Germany to personally help
the curator hang the goddamned show I thought: I’m not
going to go all the way to Kassel, West Germany, and not
see Robert hung. “Documenta 6” was Robert’s first kind of
real breakthrough. He was very happy. He was in Europe
and his photographs were on exhibition.
Then we all went to Basel, Switzerland. I remember we
had William Wegman, his wife, and the dog, and Robert.
We were quite an entourage arriving in Basel. The artist, his
wife, their dog, and the photographer. So that was my
objective in 1977. I was trying to introduce Robert as an
artist, and not just a photographer.
JACK: Your concept clarifies quite a bit. In order to explain
an artist working with photography, you had to educate
people that photography was not the bastard child of
painting.
HOLLY: Well, we really tried. All of us together. I had
known Sam Wagstaff before either of us knew Robert, and
Sam had met Robert before I did.
JACK: Sam had met Robert very early in the 1970s.
Actually, film footage exists, much like the footage of the
very young Bill Clinton meeting President Kennedy in the
Rose Garden, of Sam Wagstaff introducing Robert as a
rising star to the collector Robert Scull in 1973.
HOLLY: Sam was the great curatorial person who helped
photography achieve its identity as art. Sam really loved
Robert. He adored Robert’s work, and he adored Robert. He
helped Robert wherever possible, but he was sophisticated
enough to Robert’s career needs to take a backseat role once
I began dealing with Robert in the gallery.
JACK: What was Robert like when you were with him on
his first trip to Basel? Now that he’s dead, people want to
know what he was like behind the face he shows in his self-portraits.
HOLLY: He already had many European friends, people he
had met in New York. Sam was very connected. And Robert
was so charming. He really was an extremely sweet human
being. Everyone liked him. I remember once we went out to
dinner. I’ll never forget that he was trying to convince me
that I had to wear leather.
“Holly” Robert said, “you’ve got to try leather.”
“Robert, I hate leather. It’s cold in the winter, and hot in
the summer. Forget it!”
“Oh, no!” Robert said. “You’ll look perfectly beautiful in
leather.”
JACK: He liked his women in leather.
HOLLY: Oh yes. Really, I admired him very much for
adoring Patti. I’ll never forget how he once dragged me to
this concert somewhere the hell outside of New York. He
was very proud of her. He cared very much for her. I was
very proud in retrospect because I thought that we were two
people whom he really loved, and who really meant
something to him. The way he took Patti’s photograph and
mine was just different than anybody else.
JACK: I love the photos of you. The triptych Robert shot in
1976. Each of the three frames reveals more of you. Like
time lapse of a flower.
HOLLY: I treasure it.
JACK: It’s wonderful.
HOLLY: That portrait series was pivotal. He wanted to join
my gallery. I wanted to see him work, not an audition of his
talent so much as of that charismatic ingredient very
necessary to a photographer: how the photographer deals
with people. How he can manipulate the poser. So, I said to
Robert, “Okay, kid, I’m going to try you out. Before I take
you on in my gallery, you can do my portrait, and I’m going
to pay you.”
I didn’t tell him why I particularly wanted to see him
work shooting my portrait. I really wanted to know how he
dealt with people he was photographing, because the one
thing that I thought I could do was get him commissions for
portraits.
So I sat for him. He worked so easy, and he made you
feel so comfortable.
JACK: When I sat for him, he worked effortlessly; he
seemed to do nothing while creating everything.
HOLLY: He had an extraordinary gift for working with
people. I was an actress in earlier years. Andy wanted me to
play the part in Lonesome Cowboys that he finally gave to
Viva. I told Andy, “I’m not going to Phoenix with Joe
Dallesandro and your group, dear.” If he had shot it in New
York, I might have done the movie. I was just taking care of
myself. As an actress, I had worked with absolutely horrible
photographers who were not artists. Every job was “dear,”
“honey,” “babe.” They made you feel lower than a
prostitute. Robert was the soul of respect and charm—and
not above using cunning when it was for someone’s own
good. I think Robert never abused the trust of anyone whom
he photographed.
JACK: Thank you. I’ve spent a lot of years on the West
Coast defending Robert’s personality. He was no saint, but
he was no villain either. He was as charming as he was
cunning, and he was very good at dismissing people who
became tedious.
HOLLY: Robert and I always had so much patience with
each other. And sometimes I needed it. Especially early on.
Right at the first, right in the middle of the first show I gave
for him, he came into my gallery, polite, friendly,
businesslike, but very sweet, like a real mensch, which I’ve
always respected. And he said he wanted to move his show
away from my gallery up to the Robert Miller Gallery.
That was very tragic for me. An artistic loss. My mother
had just died. A personal loss. It was a trying time. Anyway,
I said to him, “Robert, I respect your decision. I wish you
had waited till after the show to leave.” I told him frankly it
was quite rash to leave in the middle of a show. But, and this
was my advice to him, I said, “It’s your career. I think it’s a
stupid move, because you could have asked for and gotten
the best of both worlds.”
JACK: Which was Holly Solomon downtown, and Robert
Miller uptown.
HOLLY: Yes. I tried to tell him about gathering power to
himself.
JACK: Maybe he felt more comfortable uptown.
HOLLY: I think he felt more at home and at ease in the
Robert Miller Gallery—for reasons I don’t wish to be
quoted.
JACK: Ambitions, rivalries, sexual preference. Anyone can
fill in the blanks after the fact without incriminating anyone.
HOLLY: Nevertheless, I continued to support his work,
even though neither Robert nor the subsequent galleries ever
gave me any credit for showing him first.
JACK: Art politics is like politics in every area. The San
Francisco gallery owner Robert Opel, who showed
Mapplethorpe in 1979, was also overlooked. His Fey Way
Gallery exhibitions of Mapplethorpe I’ve never seen listed
anywhere. In fact, none of my published writing on Robert
has been noted in any of the bibliographies. At least, you
were finally mentioned in the acknowledgments in the
Whitney book, Robert Mapplethorpe. The critic Edward
Lucie-Smith, who was also around Robert from the first, has
always said that in England, you are known as the woman
who was so very important to Mapplethorpe’s early career.
HOLLY: Well, I had hoped to be.
JACK: But after the first burst of Mapplethorpe, after you
had given him confidence and credibility...
HOLLY: He bid me farewell, and he presented me with his
self-portrait with the whip up his rectum. To put it mildly, I
kind of gasped.
JACK: This was his parting gift?
HOLLY: Let’s say I knew there was a message.
JACK: Maybe about him acting like an asshole.
HOLLY: But I understood that he meant me no insult. My
former husband took one look at it and said, “Tear it up.” I
said, “No, no. Someday I’ll sell it for an awful lot.”
JACK: Robert was very clever about giving photographs to
special friends. Sort of repaying people for their help. He
was generous to me, but I know he was generally most
stingy at giving out prints of his pictures.
HOLLY: After he left my gallery in 1977, Robert really
never talked to me.
JACK: Don’t feel bad. Around 1983, Robert started
dropping lots of people. By 1984, he was not remembered
fondly in San Francisco. People resented being dropped. By
1985, he had closed his circle down to a Manhattan few My
relationship to him by that time was only by telephone and
usually he made the calls when he was traveling and lonely.
He had suspected for at least three years that he had HIV. He
didn’t see how he could have been anything but infected. By
1986, when his diagnosis was rather public knowledge, he
had retreated into himself and his work in the way so typical
of artists with AIDS. Our mutual friend, the San Francisco
photographer Crawford Barton, who died in 1993, had told
me that his diagnosis had pushed him into a veritable orgy of
productive work.
HOLLY: When Robert became extremely ill, I wrote him a
letter. Robert sent word back indirectly through a mutual
friend in San Francisco who said, “Holly, please, Robert
would like to meet you for dinner.” I said, “Of course.” So
after all those years, I had dinner with Robert. It was very
sad. Actually, it was quite appalling.
JACK: Was that in 1989, before his last illness?
HOLLY: I forget the actual date. It was before his
Retrospective. Maybe 1987. At dinner, he made me promise
I would go to the Retrospective. He looked so sick. But we
just giggled and laughed as if we’d been in constant touch
for the last ten years. That night, I think, Robert thought I
was terribly funny. Few people understand that an elongated
death by AIDS is stressful. We laughed and giggled, but, of
course, my heart was heavy. That’s how we made up, and,
after that dinner, every time we saw each other, it was
“Hello” with big hugs and kisses.
Of course, I did go to his Whitney Retrospective in 1988.
Dear Robert! He was so sick. When I went over to
congratulate and kiss him, he said to me, “Holly, this is my
retribution for leaving you.” He was seated in a wheelchair.
“This is my retribution,” he said, “to be sitting here looking
at your portrait all night.”
Robert had actually stationed himself in his chair in front
of the portrait of me. It was the one I had hired him to shoot,
so I could see how he worked before I knew what he could
do.
With that, I really wanted to cry.
I said, “No, Robert, there’s no need for retribution. I’m
so proud of you.”
And that was the last time I saw him.
JACK: What a scene that opening at the Whitney was! And
what a tableau. You with the honored, dying artist staring at
your portrait.
HOLLY: Of course, I’m still very proud of him. And
protective of his work. I am instrumental in correcting the
marketplace about his work. I do have a gallery I do promote
art. After Robert died, I called up a particular auction house
that had advertised an original Mapplethorpe in a beautiful
original Mapplethorpe frame. The price quoted to me was
two thousand dollars.
I said, “You really have got to be joking.”
They said, “No, no. Two thousand dollars. That’s what
they sell for. Not a penny less.”
So I bought it, and in three days I called the manager at
the auction house and said, “You really should get your
figures and facts straight.” I took pains to explain that a
Mapplethorpe was not just a photograph, that they were not
estimating the value of a photograph, that it was one of a
kind. Done in the original frame.
“Oh yes, yes,” I was told.
“Oh, my yes,” I said. “You guys made quite a big
mistake. I just sold your not-a-penny-less photograph for
forty thousand dollars.”
JACK: I’m not surprised. Nobody knew that Robert would
get his fifteen minutes of fame after he died. Immediately
after Robert died, when I first approached magazines with
my “Pentimento” feature article, even Manhattan magazines
didn’t know who he was, or didn’t think he was important
enough to memorialize. You understood him. I understood
him. But so many people just didn’t get it.
HOLLY: Robert was very ambitious, and he loved money
more than anything. I once said to him, when we were
talking about his health, “Robert, you’re not going to die.
You love money too much.”
JACK: Money can keep you young. It can keep you alive. It
can keep you moist.
HOLLY: We joked about money a lot. But money was no
joke to Robert. Not really. Money was his way up and out of
the working class.
JACK: At the beginning, did you meet his family?
HOLLY: I met his mom and dad. He was very gracious and
courtly to his mother and father.
JACK: He sometimes spoke to me about his younger
brother, Ed, because my only sister, whom Robert had met,
was about the same age.
HOLLY: His parents were working class, and that was good
because most artists come from the working class. Great
artists rarely come from the upper classes. His folks were
very Irish-looking to me. Robert and I both tried to make
them feel at ease.
JACK: It’s not easy for parents when a child turns out to be
an artist.
HOLLY: They were so very proud of their son.
JACK: That was then—at Robert’s first show. After the
Helms and NEA scandal, Robert’s father was quoted in
Newsweek saying he wouldn’t want any of those
photographs hanging around his living room.
HOLLY: I realized from the start that Robert considered it
very important to be extremely social. More so than most
people.
JACK: Art let him move in a richer crowd.
HOLLY: He was suddenly with the class he aspired to
become.
JACK: Art and money gave him social mobility out of his
blue-collar Irish background.
HOLLY: Exactly. I understood immediately why he loved
all these social beings. He did. He loved royalty.
JACK: One morning, his phone woke us up in bed. He
rolled over and said, “Ah, principessa!” I said, “Robert, stop
it!” He could be so vulgar about royalty. He was in his
glory.
HOLLY: I actually told him once, “Robert we are a
democracy.” I really did. But beyond the patronage of
royalty, it’s very important for artists to support each other’s
work. In Robert’s case, when I took him into my gallery,
everyone in my gallery helped to support his work.
JACK: What made him attractive to them at the start? Was it
just because he was good-looking? Or was it that he was
doing his Liza Minnelli number from Cabaret: “Divine
decadence, darling!”
HOLLY: Robert worked all those angles, but my artists
simply thought he was a good photographer. Plus, he was
this photoevangelist daring people to pay serious attention to
photographs as art objects. Also, and I don’t blush to say it, I
showed his work to every single curator I knew
JACK: And weren’t you also responsible for guiding Robert
into fashion photography?
HOLLY: I had a few friends who were fashion designers. I
said to Robert, “Come on, try this too. Try every venue you
can.” He did. He was very open and cooperative. He had his
own mind but he took suggestion well.
JACK: So you truly introduced him to the genre of fashion
photography.
HOLLY: Yes, I did. I worked very hard for Robert. And I
continue to do so.
JACK: He was so personal with me that I wonder, was he
very personal with you?
HOLLY: I can remember we went to Broadway once. To go
to the movies. And we found ourselves standing outside a
dirty-book store.
JACK: Of course! One of those Forty-second Street
“libraries” where he got that exhilarated feeling of looking at
forbidden sex!
HOLLY: I knew he’d gotten his collage materials there.
JACK: That’s where he first read my work and decided we
had to meet.
HOLLY: We stood outside the adult bookstore. He kind of
looked at me funny.
I said, “Robert, what the hell’s wrong with you?”
He laughed. “Oh, come on, Holly,” he said. “You don’t
want to go in there.”
“Yes, Robert, I do. I want to go inside and see for
myself.”
He turned beet red. He thought I was kind of a dummy,
but his protectiveness was kind of sweet, you know, because
I’m old enough to be his mother.
JACK: Were there magazines or sex objects in the store?
HOLLY: Objects and magazines. We walked around
looking at everything. He was a little embarrassed. I wasn’t
at all. I was genuinely interested in how people used that
stuff. It was like a scientific/anthropological expedition. I
laugh when I remember how Robert turned beet red.
JACK: Call the National Enquirer. “Mapplethorpe Blushes
in Dildo Store.”
HOLLY: Robert so enjoyed shock value.
JACK: I recently showed a woman friend Robert’s
photographs. I asked her if she found his work shocking, and
she said, “No. The only thing I find shocking about these
photographs is that I’ve never seen them before.”
HOLLY: So true. Censorship is shocking. Robert showed
me everything. I respected him the more for that. And, to tell
the truth, during the trial in Ohio, I hung one of his accused
“dirty” photographs in my gallery when I was having a
summer group show.
Bill Wegman was about to open a show at the Taft
Museum, and the curator asked me about the wisdom of
opening Bill’s show in such a censorious climate. I felt it
very important to open Bill’s show. I am against that kind of
censorship. I was very instrumental in getting the American
Dealers Association to write a letter publicly in support of
Robert’s show. I called up the ADA and insisted that a letter
be written right away against any kind of censorship. I will
always defend Robert’s work. Even past his death.
And, oh, it’s so very sad to think that he’s gone.
JACK: I know. The work lives, but he’s gone. We can
celebrate the work. That’s why I appreciate your telling me
that Robert blushed. It’s like a nuclear flash. Most people
don’t think that Robert Mapplethorpe would blush at
anything.
HOLLY: Robert blushed quite often. Actually, I must say,
my humor with him often made him blush.
JACK: You were close to Andy Warhol as well as to Robert.
HOLLY: Andy was always very instrumental in my
professional life. But both men, Andy and Robert, kept me
out of the personal part of their lives. Of course, I kept them
out of mine. One should. Andy and Robert treated me like
some madonna. I was never expected to participate in their
sex lives or drug lives. They both gave me the highest
respect.
JACK: Do you find that’s basically a statement about
Robert’s relationship to women?
HOLLY: Yes. I think so. Robert was keen about people and
quite sensitive about women.
JACK: And Patti?
HOLLY: I must say, I felt Robert really loved Patti. I mean
really. Robert and Patti were both tolerant of my way of life
as I was of theirs. But I don’t presume to know what their
relationship actually was. He really loved her. I don’t know
if they had sex or not, nor do I care, but he loved her.
JACK: Patti was his constant subject from his first
photographs to the last.
HOLLY: I feel every person’s sexuality is personal to them.
Everyone should have freedom of action as long as they
don’t hurt anyone. What Robert enjoyed sexually, you may
know, but I don’t. He liked leather. That means something.
And he had declared himself a homosexual. That’s such a
big relief. The worst are the closet people. Robert, I will
attest from the very personal way he treated me with respect,
was always most gracious to women. Women loved him.
JACK: If the women got a fair shake, then what about the
men in the leather photographs?
HOLLY: I admired Robert’s amazing talent in trying to
make everyone as beautiful as they possibly could be. He
never put a back-handed spin on his subjects the way some
photographers really try to make people look as ugly as
possible. He wasn’t mean or nasty in that way at all.
JACK: For history’s sake, to whom did you make Robert’s
first significant sale?
HOLLY: Barbara and Eugene Schwarz were the first people
to buy one of Robert’s photographs. They bought his 1976
portrait of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Eugene had thought to
put together a photography collection in the face of the great
dichotomy: either a person collected photography or
collected art.
JACK: Enter Holly Solomon.
HOLLY: Indeed. I carried his work into the gallery and
hung it on the wall. I wanted to create a market for the
concept Robert Mapplethorpe brought to me in his
evangelical zeal to canonize photographs as art.