Good condition.
Signed and dated on the lower right and numbered on the lower left.
There is a slight undulation present across the surface of the photogravure.
Additionally, a few small brown stains are visible along the margins.
There is a light pale stain resulting from the frame's mate.

Publisher: The Limited Editions Club, New York

This series of eight works titled A Season in Hell reveals the influence of Christianity on Robert Mapplethorpe’s (1946-1989) work. After growing up in a religious background, Mapplethorpe would continually explore devotional imagery as a theme and rebel against it. The title of this photo series references Arthur Rimbaud’s (1854-1891), a transgressive French poet, 1873 poem of the same name. Mapplethorpe and Rimbaud both critique and openly subvert the bourgeois social conventions of normative behaviour.

In this series, Mapplethorpe created an iconic self-portrait as the Devil with horns. Maintaining a powerful and neutral gaze with the viewer, Mapplethorpe acknowledges 1980s attitudes to queer sexualities and reflects the judgmental projections back to the viewer. This image is accompanied by cinematic photographs of nude bodies and still lifes. Many of the photographs appear to be metaphors for queer sexual experiences that employ historic Christian iconography, perhaps best expressed in the photograph of the rose. This famous photo series expresses Mapplethorpe’s fascination with the duality of heaven and hell, and its relationship to queer lives.