Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) Lisa Lyon

Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989)
Lisa Lyon, 1982
Gelatin silver print; flush-mounted, the photographer's copyright stamp, signed and dated in ink, on the reverse, framed; this work is one from an edition of 10 plus 2 Artist's Proofs.
19 1/8 x 15 1/4 in. (48.6 x 38.7 cm.)
sheet 19 3/4 x 15 7/8 in. (50.2 x 40.3 cm.)
Provenance
The photographer to Lisa Lyon
Phillips New York, 4 April 2012, Lot 122
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Literature
Robert Mapplethorpe, Lady Lisa Lyon, (New York, 1983), p. 99

Note
Taken in Mapplethorpe's New York studio in 1982, Lisa Lyon - perhaps the photographer's most frequent and iconic muse - wears an animal-print dress by Norma Kamali, with hair and makeup by Rory Bernal.

"...Each session between L[yon] & M[applethorpe] seemed to shake loose from the last with an unpredictability common to women but less so to photography in series. Of course, Mapplethorpe always makes it more difficult for himself by deliberately framing everything and everybody in the same straitjacket style - the world reinvented as logic, precision, sculpture in obvious light and shadow.

I don't suppose he would ever have taken a second exposure of Lisa if her classicism and ideals of order had not been a match for his. 'The pictures are a little hard, like us,' [Lyon] says, adding, however, that in her Houdini act to escape the shackles of womanly stereotype, it is in the nonjudgemental precincts of these photos that she has been able to complete an emotional breakthrough that is impossible in life." - Samuel Wagstaff, Lady Lisa Lyon, 1983