Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1989). Man in Polyester Suit, 20 x 16", 1980. Gelatin silver print, printed 1980.
While Mapplethorpe may have created this photograph to shock, its success as a provocation rests on its solid compositional structure; there is not a single element that could be adjusted to improve it.
– Paul Martineau and Britt Salvesen
Man in Polyester Suit encapsulates Robert Mapplethorpe’s unique ability to create an image that is both confrontational in content and technically and aesthetically perfect. It has become, in the years since its making, one of Mapplethorpe’s best-known images and has inspired both acclaim and controversy.
Over 40 years after its making, Man in Polyester Suit has lost none of its undeniable impact. Its subject is Mapplethorpe’s lover, Milton Moore. The two had a tempestuous and ultimately doomed relationship. It is a testament to Mapplethorpe’s talents that — out of the messiness of his physical and emotional entanglement with Moore — he created this austere, dignified, and transgressively-charged photograph.
The image was exhibited in no fewer than 20 international museum and gallery venues during Mapplethorpe’s lifetime, including his 1981 exhibition at the Frankfurter Kunstverein and his multi-venue 1983 retrospective, which originated at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art. The photograph was famously impounded by customs officials upon its arrival for that exhibition.
Man in Polyester Suit was shown in the Whitney Museum’s 1988 Mapplethorpe retrospective and was a cornerstone of the Black Males exhibition in Amsterdam, New York, and Rome. Mapplethorpe also included it, with a slightly different cropping and in a smaller format than the print offered here, in his Z Portfolio of 1981 — and it was illustrated in his definitive collection of Black male nudes, The Black Book of 1986.
Man in Polyester Suit became a key focal point of the controversy surrounding The Perfect Moment, the seminal retrospective exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s work that originated at Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art in 1988 and was slated for six subsequent museum venues in America. The presence of Mapplethorpe’s explicit images of sadomasochism and other sexually charged photographs on display in public venues, some of which received government funding, raised the ire of conservative lawmakers, Senator Jesse Helms foremost among them. Helms on the floor of the United States Senate railed against the supposed obscenity of the material and pushed for legislation that would limit funding for the arts. Man in Polyester Suit was one of four Mapplethorpe images that Helms sent to fellow congressmen to bolster his condemnation of the show and to encourage their support.
(Man in Polyester Suit) has come to be regarded as perhaps the most important picture from (The Perfect Moment), as well as Mapplethorpe’s most slyly powerful work, a deadpan commentary on race, class, sexual sterotypes and the slipperty nature of phtography itself that continues to jangle nerves.
—Randy Kennedy and Hilarie M. Sheets in The New York Times, Oct 1, 2015
As it toured, The Perfect Moment accrued more and more controversy. When the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D. C. abruptly withdrew as a venue for the exhibition, the tension increased. By the time police entered the exhibition at Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center and charged the institution and its director with obscenity, international attention reached a peak. The media storm that followed, and the ensuing trial, played out against the grim backdrop of the AIDS epidemic, with the photographer’s own illness and death from the disease in 1989. Ultimately, the Museum and its director were acquitted, and a victory won for free speech, artistic freedom, and institutional autonomy!
In the intervening years, Man in Polyester Suit has remained one of Mapplethorpe’s signature images. Ingrid Sischy in The New Yorker called it Mapplethorpe’s “wryest image of all.” The critic Arthur C. Danto hailed Man in Polyester Suit as Mapplethorpe’s masterpiece. It is one of those works, like Edouard Manet’s Olympia or Gustave Courbet’s L’origine du monde, that challenges accepted ways of portraying the body in art. These works and their makers were vilified upon their debut. Ultimately, Man in Polyester Suit endures. Its challenge remains vibrantly relevant.
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