# Robert Mapplethorpe **Robert Mapplethorpe** (November 4, 1946 – March 9, 1989) was the New York photographer — studio formalist of calla lilies, celebrity portraits, classical black male nudes and the sadomasochistic *X Portfolio* of 1978 — who died of AIDS three months before his touring retrospective *The Perfect Moment* made him the central exhibit of the [[NEA Culture Wars]]. He is in the vault as the culture war's first effigy: an artist whose work was argued over by senators who had not seen it, in a fight that was never about the photographs. ## The Perfect Moment The show, organized by Philadelphia's Institute of Contemporary Art with a $30,000 [[National Endowment for the Arts]] grant, had opened without incident in Philadelphia and Chicago when, in June 1989, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington cancelled it rather than risk Congress — see [[Corcoran Mapplethorpe Cancellation]]. [[Jesse Helms]] then held up the *X Portfolio* images on the Senate floor, secured an amendment barring NEA funds for "obscene" work, and the following spring Cincinnati prosecuted its Contemporary Arts Center and director Dennis Barrie for exhibiting the show — the first obscenity prosecution of a museum in American history, acquitted by a jury in October 1990 ([[Cincinnati Mapplethorpe Obscenity Trial]]). The pairing with Andres Serrano's *Piss Christ*, funded through a separate NEA grant, gave the right its formula: taxpayer money, blasphemy, homosexuality, one dead artist who could not answer. ## Why he matters here Mapplethorpe's case built the machinery the culture war still runs on — the decency clause, the defunding threat, the museum board that cancels first — and it established the pattern the vault tracks from the NEA to the Smithsonian: the state does not need to censor when it can make an institution do it for itself. His foundation became one of the largest private funders of AIDS research and of photography. See [[NEA Culture Wars]]. ## See Also - [[NEA Culture Wars]] · [[Corcoran Mapplethorpe Cancellation]] · [[Cincinnati Mapplethorpe Obscenity Trial]] · [[Jesse Helms]] · [[National Endowment for the Arts]]