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Rating: Who doesn't know Patti Smith? Great artist. Great poetess. Great musical progenitor. If you asked me who the female musician that most influenced my adolescence is... have you already guessed? But one thing is undeniable: Patti is not what one might call a beauty. So skinny, unkempt, tousled hair, no makeup, small breasts, and minimal sensuality. A kind of female Keith Richards, I might say (forgive me). And yet, and yet...
In 1970, a twenty-year-old Smith settled at the Chelsea Hotel in New York, the famous Chelsea Hotel where the entire rock world passed through, and from which some guests left with their feet forward. She didn't go to live alone, Patti, but with a peer friend, Robert Mapplethorpe. They were an unconventional, bohemian, and complementary couple. He was bisexual leaning towards gay, she was so androgynous. Eros sometimes takes winding paths. They loved each other a lot. Robert was a visual artist. Initially, it was paintings and collages. Then a gallery owner gifted him a Polaroid. He used it to draw images for his works, but it didn't take long for him to switch permanently to photography. And who to photograph if not his muse and lover? We all know Patti's images taken by her friend. The covers of the Patti Smith Group, for instance, whose first single "Hey Joe - Piss Factory" was financed by the photographer himself. Then came Arista Records, but that's another story.
Mapplethorpe claimed that seeing nudity in an image is a fierce and cruel experience. Looking at nudes in photography is masochistic, as the vision excludes the pleasure of touch and caress. Look but don't touch, do you remember when they told you that as children and you suffered because you then felt a sense of frustration and anger? So during his brief journey, Mapplethorpe sought the image of the perfect nude, one that should not evoke masochism. A daunting task. Hence: research on static, sculptural poses, and mania for symmetry. Flight from sunlight or natural light, and no facial expression, no looks or at most glances. Beauty, strength, but not eroticism. A nude that loses its intimate secret and becomes a unique representation of itself. A pursuit that often bordered on pornography, but thanks to the approach, almost never reached it.
Yet the photograph you see on this page turns everything said above upside down. It is an image born from love and not from reasoning. In my opinion, the most beautiful image of a woman's nude, absolutely. Patti the androgynous caught in her hidden femininity. Black and white. A veil of sunlight. And that expression, a little sullen. Patti the punk, in all her intimate delicacy. Patti the tough, in all her personal vulnerability. You would want to touch her, go to her and hug her, smell her scent, give her some of your warmth. Protect her. She is clinging to that radiator, but you can tell it's cold. And that oval and soft shape, so feminine, erotic, and fetal, despite the anorexic body. Patti woman, terribly woman. It is a photograph that makes us all masochists.
They didn’t live together for long, the two of them. She was a free spirit, and he even more so. Sam Shepard arrived and Patti fell in love. Other men came along and Mapplethorpe became infatuated. But they remained best of friends for life, until Aids took him away in '89.
I am convinced that throughout the rest of his brief life, Robert kept this image locked in a drawer, not hung on the wall of his studio. Because he dodged the masochism of seeing but not touching, and so I really believe he kept it away from his sight. But I am equally certain, in my vivid imagination, that he occasionally took this image out of hiding. In secret.
And touched it with his fingers. Tenderly. Hurting himself.
(It is no coincidence that I propose this small and useless reflection on Mapplethorpe to you. From March 21 to June 13, an important exhibition dedicated to him - "The Perfection of Form" - will be held in Lugano at the Villa Malpensata Art Museum. I will be there, and you? It is the ideal occasion to seriously delve into his work and maybe, why not, have a coffee together. Give me a shout, just in case. Furthermore, within the initiatives promoted for this exhibition, Patti Smith will be in concert at the Lugano Palazzo dei Congressi on Wednesday, March 31, accompanied by some of her “historic” musicians, like Lenny Kaye on guitar and Tony Shanahan on bass and keyboards.)
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