Brody's Notes... LA Museum & Getty Acquire Robert Mapplethorpe Collections

Courtesy Of The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

By Mark Singer (Washington DC) FEB 7 | The Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Trust for the Getty Museum in a joint press release announced today that those institutions have acquired more than 2,000 works by artist Robert Mapplethorpe, including a print of "virtually every photograph" he made in silver gelatin, the black-and-white process he used for his most widely known works.

The Mapplethorpe Foundation gave the majority of the material to the two institutions. The remainder was made possible by the David Geffen Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Trust.

The acquisition also includes the Mapplethorpe archive, thousands of Polaroid studies for his work, one-of-a-kind silver gelatin prints, personal correspondence to intimates such as musician and writer Patti Smith and the documentation of the 1990 obscenity trial in Cincinnati that made Mapplethorpe a central figure in the decade's culture wars.