Robert Mapplethorpe’s flowers of romanticism and rage

How long should cut flowers last? A week? Three? My view of them has been widened by an unusual show that has been pulling in visitors in Sarasota, Florida. There, the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens is presenting works by the master photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and his fellow American muse, the singer, poet and artist Patti Smith. The show is themed round flowers, light and poetry and runs until June 26.

“The romantic garden within him”, Smith once wrote in a tribute to Mapplethorpe, “raged with wild bloom which he plucked and carelessly tossed in every direction”. That bloom was not exactly horticultural. As she emphasised, Mapplethorpe “was no naturalist [ . . . ] art, not nature, moved him.” His best-known images are his portraits, including ones of Smith: “with you”, he told her, “I can’t miss.” Others are of sexual practices and contortions that he himself classed as X and exhibited in a glass case only for viewers over the age of 18.

In the 1970s, he came out as gay and entered particular milieus whose practices had not been the subject of previous public exhibitions of photographs. “His mission was not to reveal”, Smith recognised, but “to document”, and “he wanted his subjects to feel pleased with his photographs”. Some now sell for more than prints by Andy Warhol, the artist he had once, from nothing, aspired to excel.

As a subject, flowers may seem far from these visuals of self-inflicted pain, but Mapplethorpe photographed them too, cut, arranged in carefully chosen vases and presented with intricate patterns of light and shade. Flowers, he used to say, are easier to work with than human models. In his art during the final two years of his life, flowers were as prominent subjects for him as sadomasochism.

Smith well understood that they were not an escape or a digression. In 1989, when he was near death from the effects of Aids, he urged her to take particular care of his flower images. In 1990 they were published as Flowers with an introduction by herself. “He came, in time,” she wrote, “to embrace the flower as the embodiment of all the contradictions revelling within. Their sleekness, their fullness. Humble Narcissus. Passionate Zen.”

In its garden museum the Selby Garden is displaying several of Mapplethorpe’s black and white images of flowers, first printed under his direction at Graphicstudio, Tampa, Florida. In the garden and its conservatory, cameos of living flowers evoke aspects of his use of light, shade and texture. He took especial care over framing the flowers in his images and contrasting them with their background: white tulips before a black backing were a favourite example.

Selby’s gardeners have made clever play with rectangular frames cut from plywood, even using them as a receding series leading back to a single potted flower or vase behind. The garden’s orchids are its special strengths, but a single lady’s slipper orchid gains from being framed. The idea is worth imitating for indoor plants at focal points in an apartment.

For a fortnight in May I enjoyed vases of homegrown Narcissus Jetfire, handpicked and arranged so that the flowers did not touch each other. I liked their scent and clarity of form, but never thought that they embodied inner contradictions, let alone humility and passion: why did Mapplethorpe?

Such questions are deep, but one reason is the pseudo Zen philosophising that became fashionable in 1960s and 1970s American counterculture. Another may be Mapplethorpe’s heightened sense of contradictions in his own nature. In his youth, he would recall, he served loyally as a Catholic altar boy. In his early twenties, however, he began to draw images of Lucifer the fallen Angel of Light and became interested in Satan.

Once, Smith found him on a bad acid trip, “wrestling good and evil” with a whip on one side of him and a spray-painted mask of the devil on the other. The Church brought him to God, he would say, and LSD to the universe: then, art brought him to the devil and sex kept him there.

Whereas most of us look on cut flowers as transient, fleeting beauties, Mapplethorpe looked for what he believed to be their permanent essence. This ideal helps to explain why his images of flowers tend to have a metallic quality. He was trying to capture their essence without any understanding of the science of flowers or their true nature.

Those trips on LSD left him trying to represent a different sort of “perfection”. It also related to sexuality, perhaps more than he realised. The flower of an orchid is a sexual bait for insects as it resembles a female insect splayed on its back. The leaning angle of a hyacinth’s solid flower stem, well shown in the Selby show, can also be given a phallic reference.

For Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith explains, nature “was meant to be redesigned: opened and folded like a fan”. This approach brings gardeners up with a bump. In the Selby garden, well-chosen words from her writings do the same. Printed on storyboards to lead visitors through her and Mapplethorpe’s years together, first as lovers, then on “separate ways together”, they too are worth pondering.

In 1967, a remarkable chance threw them together, 20 years old, vagrants in New York City, almost broke, and hungry. At once Mapplethorpe inspired her with his utter dedication to art and his confidence in his own genius. On a fine afternoon that autumn, they were walking and watching in Washington Square when a married couple, Smith recalls, observed them closely: they had very striking looks and generally dressed accordingly. On being observed, Robert responded by squeezing Patti’s hand. “Oh, take their picture,” the wife said to her bemused husband. “I think they’re artists.” “Oh go on,” he shrugged, “they’re just kids.”

Just Kids is the title of Patti Smith’s exceptional memoir, published in 2010. It needed a touch of genius to seize that comment in its context and another to retain it for more than 50 years. I wish I could paste it on the door of every university bureaucrat whose aim is to manage “student intake”.

If it had been taken, the Washington Square photo would have been a coup. Three years later, Mapplethorpe acquired his first Polaroid camera. Three more years passed and his photos were in a solo exhibition in New York. Two more years passed and Smith issued her acclaimed first album Horses, on whose cover is Mapplethorpe’s great portrait of her. Last year, she was given the key to the city of New York.

When Mapplethorpe died, aged 43, she wrote of him “grasping the hand of God to lead him to another garden”. She has just given two concerts in the Selby garden to coincide with its show in their honour. The limited tickets sold out within half an hour.

Robin Lane Fox travelled as a guest of the Marie Selby garden; selby.org

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