A Major Gift of Robert Mapplethorpe Photos From a Famous Dutch Choreographer Lands at the Rijksmuseum

One of Robert Mapplethorpe’s
final exhibitions during his lifetime was at the Stedelijk Museum
in Amsterdam in 1988. No one expected him to be able to travel–he
would die a little more than a year later, from AIDS-related
complications. “Robert had always loved Amsterdam,” his friend and
fellow photographer Lynn Davis recounted in Mapplethorpe: A
Biography. “At the
opening, he was surrounded by all his old friends….He was really
weak, but we spent one afternoon looking at the van Goghs and that
seemed to cheer him up.” 

And it seems that Amsterdam
loved Mapplethorpe back. Now, 24 of the late artist’s works are
being donated to the city’s Rijksmuseum, a gift from Dutch
choreographer Hans van Manen and his husband, Henk van
Dijk.

“Donating these works now means
I can enjoy doing so myself, in the knowledge that they will stay
together forever,” said van Manen in a press release. “I have been
looking at them for 40 years; now other people will be able to
enjoy them.”

Van Manen’s collection includes
a 1980 self-portrait of the photographer moodily smoking; 1982’s
self-explanatory Naked
man seen from behind, leaning again a railing,
among other erotic
images; a portfolio of
floral photographs; and a portrait Mapplethorpe took of van Manen
himself. The Rijksmusuem plans to include these works in an
exhibition of American photography from 1839 to the present day
that the institution is currently organizing.

The museum has 150,000
photographs in its collection, but until this point, only had one
work by Mapplethorpe, a portrait of Patti Smith. “Good
Mapplethorpes fetch such high prices (and have been doing so for a
long while) that they are beyond the reach of the museum unless
they can be acquired through donation,” the museum said in a
statement. 

“We are deeply grateful to Hans
van Manen and Henk van Dijk for their generous gift,” said Taco
Dibbits, director of the Rijksmuseum, in the statement.
“Benefactors such as themselves enable museums to enrich their
collections with great art that would otherwise be beyond their
reach.”

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Famous Dutch Choreographer Lands at the Rijksmuseum appeared
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