12. A Characterization of Robert Mapplethorpe Prints at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Tess Hamilton, Jeffrey Warda, Cynthia Yue

With a pioneering gift from The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation of nearly 200 works by Robert Mapplethorpe to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in the early 1990s, the Museum cares for one of the largest holdings of the artist’s work. This influential gift, coupled with additional financial support from the Foundation, spearheaded the growth of the photography collection at the Guggenheim with a distinct emphasis on contemporary art.

As attention was brought to Mapplethorpe and the needs of a growing collection of large-scale and complex photographic works, the Guggenheim developed an ongoing relationship with photograph conservator Paul Messier to examine and treat works in the Guggenheim’s collection over a 10-year period. These sessions facilitated rich dialog within the Conservation Department that ultimately led to a proposal for a characterization study of Mapplethorpe’s prints. This larger proposal instigated a more focused pilot study of the artist’s platinum-palladium prints that was completed in 2017. In 2019, The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation generously endowed a Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation Fellowship in Photograph Conservation at the Guggenheim, enabling the full characterization study of Mapplethorpe’s work. With artworks spanning every year of the artist’s career, a characterization of the Guggenheim’s collection provided an ideal dataset to better understand Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre. In partnership with Yale’s Lens Media Lab, the Guggenheim began this study in 2022, which to-date has focused on measurements of gloss, color, texture, thickness, size, and elemental make-up, as well as a close look at the titles, dates, and edition numbers of each artwork to resolve discrepancies between inscriptions on the prints and catalogue information from other sources.

By developing a better understanding of Mapplethorpe’s relationship to materials through his choice of papers and printing processes, the Guggenheim is starting to contextualize Mapplethorpe’s prints within the larger ecosystem of photographic materials available in the late 20th century. Lens Media Lab’s analysis of the data will speak to how Mapplethorpe’s choice of paper qualities was influenced by various factors including subject matter, time-period, and his collaborators.

The process of closely examining each print for the characterization study revealed other unexpected observations, including the discovery of magenta and cyan colorants in four gelatin silver prints from the 1970s on resin-coated paper. This spawned a secondary study of additives used in resin-coated papers, aided by the Lens Media Lab’s collection of photographic papers to better contextualize the unusual characteristics observed in Mapplethorpe’s early prints. In addition, these prints exhibited dry transfer of optical brightening agents (OBAs) onto archival housing materials, a phenomenon that was also investigated using the Lens Media Lab’s collection and found to be a form of inherent vice in some resin-coated paper bases. Through this partnership, the ongoing investigation into the collection of Mapplethorpe prints at the Guggenheim continues to reveal information.