The Grand Palais in Paris is one of Europe's most serious exhibition spaces, writes Jonathan Jones in The Guradian.
It is where France honours its great artists. This week, it opened a big exhibition dedicated to a US artist who has often been dismissed as a shallow sensation-seeker of the 1980s. Why is Robert Mapplethorpe, who died in 1989, getting this high-level retrospective now? Does he deserve it?
The fate of artists after their deaths is often a surprise. The name on the artworld's lips may suddenly fade. Or an artist once severely criticised – such as Mappelthorpe – may come to be recognised more and more simply as a creator of a unique kind of beauty. How this process happens can depend on a lot of things – even love.
Robert Mapplethorpe was loved by Patti Smith, and the rock poet and punk hero has used her voice and pen to keep his memory alive. A few years ago, Mapplethorpe got the amazing honour of being exhibited next to Michelangelo in Florence. This was partly due to Smith, who says he was deeply influenced by Michelangelo's Slaves – and finally got him to show near them in the Accademia, Florence. Then in 2010 Patti Smith published Just Kids, her compelling memoir of her life with Mapplethorpe as they searched for their artistic destinies in 1960s and 70s New York.
Just Kids is an American literary classic. It is such a beautiful book that even if Mapplethorpe were a bad artist – "that overrated photographer", as Robert Hughes put it curtly – he would live forever in Smith's memoir. She is some Vasari.
Now here he is in Paris, apotheosised. It is clearly Smith's passionate advocacy that has eased his posthumous fate, washing away cliches about him, sanctifying her friend as a true great.
Read more of this blog post from Jonathan Jones published in The Guardian.