Dick Bellamy and Rober Mapplethorpe

Judith E. Stein's book Eye of the Sixties:  Richard Bellamy and the Transformation of Modern Art (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2016) and the recent film Mapplethorpe:  Look at the Pictures on HBO, directed by Randy Barbato and Ferton Bailey, raise many questions that are worth discussing, though impossible to answer definitively:  what is art, how is it made and discovered, what is the role of the dealer, and so on. 

I knew Dick Bellamy as a tennis partner, not as an art dealer, though I had studied art history and worked at Artforum magazine.  He was a skillful player and had a sweet temperament, i.e., he didn't mind winning but mainly just loved to play. He was especially adept at putting spin on the ball and working with a partner in doubles.  According to Stein's book he was "risible, inexperienced and at times self-destructive."  He was an unusual art dealer in that he sometimes would turn down a buyer as not suitable to own a particular artist's work.  He was always short of money and was most successful when he ran The Green Gallery from 1960 to 1965 with the support of Robert Scull.  There he showed minimalism, pop art and conceptual art when those movements barely had names.  Artists included Warhol, Oldenburg, Rosenquist and Donald Judd.  To what extent he "discovered" these artists is difficult to say, i.e., perhaps some of them would have become known anyway, just as many of the artists he showed are now forgotten, for many different reasons.  Because he was essentially not good at business he gravitated at the end to living near and representing sculptor Mark di Suvero. According to Stein, Bellamy was an alcoholic, a distant father, an unfaithful lover.  He died in 1998 at the age of 70.

Robert Mapplethorpe was a controversial photographer who specialized in homoerotic photographs.  I saw  the Sandy Daley film Robert Having His Nipple Pierced at MoMA in 1971, with a soundtrack provided live by Patti Smith, with whom he lived for several years.   Mapplethorpe was influenced by religious imagery (he was brought up as a Roman Catholic in Queens) in his search for what he called "truth" (which did not stop him from re-touching photographs), with a particular interest in black men (who reminded him of classical bronzes) and their penises.  For most of his artistic career Mapplethorpe was not represented by a gallery; not only were his photographs sometimes shocking (though not always; he also photographed flowers, though in distinctive ways) photography was not yet accepted as an art form.  Mapplethorpe's social life was completely blended with his professional life and he died with AIDS in 1989, at the age of 42.