Rock’s Greatest Album Cover

It is considered one of the #greatest album covers of all time. A simple portrait to the waist of a woman in a crisp white shirt, a black ribbon draped over her shoulders, dark jeans. Her jaw is jutting out proudly, defiantly. A jacket is slung over her shoulder. The wall she is leaning against is as brilliant a white as her shirt, a blank and blinding canvas.

 

#Mapplethorpe, seen here in 1970, met Smith on the first day she moved to New York City, and they ended up living together at the Chelsea Hotel.

It is the cover of Patti Smith’s debut album #Horses, taken in a Greenwich Village apartment sometime in 1975 by Smith’s longtime friend, Robert Mapplethorpe. Mapplethorpe and Smith were both in their late 20s and veterans of a bohemian New York art scene that had created the fledgling ranks of the city’s punk rock scene. Smith’s album would make her one of the biggest stars of the New York punk scene, alongside the Ramones, Blondie and Talking Heads, and mark her as an influence on everyone from REM to PJ Harvey to Garbage’s Shirley Manson.

The photo shoot that became the cover for Horses is a defining moment. “The only rule we had was, Robert told me if I wore a white shirt, not to wear a dirty one,” Smith told NPR in 2010. “I got my favourite ribbon and my favourite jacket, and he took about 12 pictures. By the eighth one he said, ‘I got it’.” Today, the print is part of the #Tate Collection in the UK, and rightly regarded as a classic portrait.

American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (1946 – 1989) at his retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, August 1988.

By the time Mapplethorpe took this photograph, he and Smith had known each other for nearly a decade. They met in 1967, on the very first day Smith moved to New York from New Jersey; she later recounted him looking like a “hippie shepherd boy” with dark curls.

Chance encounter

The meeting was in Brentano’s bookstore on Fifth Avenue, where Mapplethorpe bought one of her favourite necklaces. “Don’t give it to any girl but me,” she told him. Smith wanted a promise from Mapplethorpe, but that was not the promise that would define their 22-year friendship. That would come at the end.

“I was a bad girl trying to be good and he was a good boy trying to be bad,” Smith wrote in Just Kids, the 2010 book that defined their relationship and was published two decades after Mapplethorpe’s death. They lived together for a time, often in squalor, in the cheapest room at the Chelsea Hotel, the Ground Zero of alternative, artistic New York. “The Chelsea was like a doll’s house in The Twilight Zone, with a hundred rooms, each a small universe,” wrote Smith. “Everyone had something to offer and nobody seemed to have much money. Even the successful seemed to have just enough to live like extravagant bums.”

NOVEMBER.2011. PARIS PATTI SMITH AT THE ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE EXHIBITION CURATED BY SOFIA COPPOLA AT THADDAEUS ROPAC GALLERY IN PARIS, FRANCE.

They were lovers until Mapplethorpe, one of five children from an Irish Catholic family, realised he was gay. Despite this – despite Mapplethorpe ending their physical intimacy – their relationship endured. It was no longer as lovers, but as artistic partners and friends. “When we were together, he didn’t tell me about his exploits, and I didn’t talk to him about other people. When we were together, we were with each other,” Smith told New York Magazine.

Mapplethorpe and Smith’s relationship endured through the 1970s and ‘80s, though it was less intimate. Smith was often on the road with her band, and she moved to Detroit after marrying the one-time MC5 guitarist Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith. And Mapplethorpe’s photographic vision became more extreme and uncompromising, as he created often graphic male and female nudes. Smith wrote in Just Kids that Mapplethorpe’s photographic preoccupations began to disturb her.

Mapplethorpe divided his time between New York and San Francisco, enjoying a feted, celebrity lifestyle. Smith was in Detroit, raising a family, in semi-retirement from her own artistic career.In 1989, Mapplethorpe lay dying from complications related to Aids. The day before he died, aged 42, Smith made him a promise – she would recount the story of their life together and ensure his photographic legacy would live on.Mapplethorpe and Smith’s relationship endured through the 1970s and ‘80s, though it was less intimate. Smith was often on the road with her band, and she moved to Detroit after marrying the one-time MC5 guitarist Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith. And Mapplethorpe’s photographic vision became more extreme and uncompromising, as he created often graphic male and female nudes. Smith wrote in Just Kids that Mapplethorpe’s photographic preoccupations began to disturb her.

 

In 1989, Mapplethorpe lay dying from complications related to Aids. The day before he died, aged 42, Smith made him a promise – she would recount the story of their life together and ensure his photographic legacy would live on.Mapplethorpe’s reputation has only grown, partly thanks to Smith becoming his champion and partly because of the work of his own foundation, set up to keep his work alive and to fund the causes he supported. Exhibitions continue to be staged around the world, and prints command high prices; one Mapplethorpe portrait of Andy Warhol, taken in 1987, sold for $643,200 in 2006.

Just Kids is Smith’s most personal part of her pledge, and possibly the most difficult; it would take her nearly 20 years to complete, with Smith struggling through draft after draft. “I probably wouldn’t have been able to finish it, except I promised him I would and I knew in my journey after death, if I bumped into him, which I know I would, he’d be so mad at me,” “You know, ‘Patti, you didn’t write our book. Why didn’t you finish the book?’ I could feel him scolding me, so I did finish it.”