Savage Beauty

Lisa Lyon’s extraordinary female strength and sexuality as told through Robert Mapplethorpe’s lens. 

Words by Emma Hope Allwood

One cold evening in November 2017 I wandered alone through New York’s Museum of Modern Art, just before closing. I had a few hours before catching a flight and wasn’t there to see anything, really. I found myself in an exhibition on the legendary Club 57, a hotspot of the East Village between the late 70s and early 80s. There, among the fliers and photographs of past revellers, I saw an image that made me stop. It depicted a woman, beautiful, topless, her black leather trousers unbuckled, holding her arms behind her in a classic bodybuilding pose, their muscles hard and defined. I thought I recognised it instantly—monochrome shot on a dark seamless background—as the work of Robert Mapplethorpe. I was wrong; the image was by Mapplethorpe’s former lover and assistant (and artist in his own right) Marcus Leatherdale. The woman, I discovered, was Lisa Lyon, although the caption provided little insight beyond her name. 

The museum was closing and I was already late, but I carried the image of Lisa Lyon with me back across the Atlantic, and when I was home, I looked her up. I saw she was a bodybuilder and had indeed been a subject of Mapplethorpe—that he had dedicated an entire book to her. I pored over his images on my iPhone, tiny reproductions that still stunned me for all they contained, a woman who appeared to transform, to be a hundred different women in one. Lisa with a bow and arrow, Lisa in a silk dress like a Greek goddess. I saved the pictures, wanting to hold onto them somehow. 

I, at that time, was searching for a better understanding of myself, trying to find the kind of womanhood I wanted to embody versus the kind I’d always felt I’d had to represent. I was looking, in a sense, for permission: for the women who had gone before me, the women who lived according to their own desires, their own ideals, their own sense of how they wanted to present themselves to the world. And there, unexpectedly, was Lisa: beautiful, deadly, powerful, sexy—she wasn’t this or that, but everything at once, without compromise. She was the kind of woman I didn’t know I could be. Mapplethorpe’s portraits, in a sense, gave me the permission I had been searching for. 

Years after those images were published, Lyon remains enigmatic: the internet contains little about her that can be verified. Users of bodybuilding forums debate where she ended up. Other than becoming an ‘adoptive daughter’ of psychedelic experimenter Dr. John C. Lilly, who inspired the 1980 movie Altered States, the facts are scant. Mapplethorpe’s series, criticised at the time for being regressive, deserves greater recognition than it currently has. The following piece is a small attempt to rectify that. 

When Lisa Lyon was at the height of her fame she fronted a perfume called “LISA” which came in a glass bottle shaped like a fist. It was a fitting metaphor. In 1979, Lyon—the daughter of a Hollywood orthodontist, a graduate of both UCLA and the infamous Gold’s Gym in Venice Beach, where she hit the racks alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger—had become the world’s first female bodybuilding champion after appearing at competitions alongside her male peers. But where they were sculpting physiques that looked ready to burst the seams of any garment that might attempt to conceal them, hers had a more subtle strength; sensual and dancer-like, her body only revealing its true power at the flexing of a muscle. Her physique wasn’t the only striking thing about her: Lyon, all dark curls and confident charm had looks that caught the eyes of Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper and eventually landed her in the pages of Playboy. 

By 1980, just a year out from her pioneering title win, Lyon had stopped competing—more interested in life as a performance artist than a strait-laced athlete— and began supplementing a job commentating on NBC with hanging out at New York nightlife hotspots like the Mudd Club and the Saint. She once described herself as “keeping vampire hours,” and it was at a late-night party that she first met another nocturnal creature, artist Robert Mapplethorpe. He liked her black rubber pants and she had been looking for someone who could capture her body in a way that would do it justice. They got straight to work. 

It was to be one of Mapplethorpe’s most prolific relationships. Rather than finding a muse (that moniker loaded with notions of total self-effacement in the service of an artist’s ideal) in Lyon, Mapplethorpe had met a more than willing co-conspirator. Collector and curator Samuel Wagstaff, Mapplethorpe’s long-term lover and patron, noted their “healthy crossfire of self esteems.” 

Mapplethorpe, who was already courting notoriety thanks to his Sex Pictures, a series of beautiful, often pornographic images featuring members of the city’s gay male S&M scene, was drawn to Lyon because she possessed a body that represented both the classical ideals he sought and something that felt new (and, perhaps, would be more commercially palatable than men in leather pissing in each other’s mouths). “I thought she was unique—she had this form that I had never seen before. It was like a complete new animal,” he said of her, speaking in an archive recording in the 2016 documentary Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures. 

The duo set about creating work together in 1980, shooting primarily in New York, but also in Paris, San Francisco, Fire Island, Jamaica, Joshua Tree and New Jersey. “My ambition, that I discussed with him, was to explore the range of possibilities of ways of viewing a woman,” Lyon recalled in the 2016 doc. “Historical ways, contemporary ways, cliché ways, unheard-of ways, tribal ways, the high fashion type, the sex goddess type, the lingerie type, the bondage type, the virgin type, the bridal type, the statue type…” Six images from the series were published in Artforum, then under the tenure of Ingrid Sischy, later that year. Mapplethorpe and Lyon worked together until 1982; with the fruits of their labour transformed into a book, Lady Lisa Lyon, published the following year. Images from the series were exhibited at Larry Gagosian’s then-newly opened LA gallery and at Leo Castelli’s New York institution. 

Over the book’s 100+ pages, Lyon transforms. She is ethereal in white, a bright-eyed bride with a bunch of pale flowers clutched almost protectively at her chest. She is a Bond girl, lethal, wielding a knife in a bikini and a snorkel. She’s a Russ Meyer-esque leading lady, in tight black leggings, leading a tiger on a chain. She’s a classical statue, reclining on a wall while her body is sheathed in trailing silk. She’s a high fashion model in sculptural Yves Saint Laurent, a new wave androgyne, a pin-up, and the original female archetype: Eve, a snake coiled over her bare shoulders. 

And, of course, she is naked. The power struggle between photographer and subject is a talking point as old as the medium itself, and along with justified accusations of racial fetishisation, the criticism levelled most at Mapplethorpe is that his pictures objectify, reducing their sitters to limbs or appendages to be desired rather than fully formed people. Unlike the famous Man in Polyester Suit, a closely-cropped image of the penis of a black man (Mapplethorpe’s lover and model Milton Moore) hanging out of his trousers, Lyon’s body parts are far from anonymous. Although she appears glamorised—airbrushed in lingerie and abstracted—her neck thrown back like Man Ray’s portrait of Lee Miller, or one toned leg sharply bisecting the square frame of an image—she’s never passively offered for consumption or for possession. Even on all fours, her roles are too performed, his gay-ze is too cold, his eye too Catholically formal, for there to be real desire here. 

Lady hasn’t given Mapplethorpe his most iconic images, but they are, especially today, worthy of appraisal. Where Mapplethorpe’s shots of black men feel uncomfortable for the narrow stereotypes they portray, Lady does the opposite. The book does a kind of justice to how it feels to be a woman: never statically one thing, but shifting through roles, occupying multiple, even seemingly contradictory spaces at once. “(In) Miss Lyon’s hermaphroditic build… bulging biceps, protruding forearm veins and unshaven underarms contrast markedly with high cheekbones and svelte, distinctly female proportions,” wrote Andy Grundberg in the New York Times around the time of the book’s publication, revealing the era’s inability to square the apparently inconsolable aspects of Lyon’s physicality. The struggle Lady overcomes is between the power and the potential of women’s bodies and the social norms which contain them. In this way, the book speaks to the multifarious ways of being a woman and the contradictory nature of womanhood. There is no one truth. Lyon is a woman, but she is strong. She wears lipstick, but she does not shave her armpits. She is alluring, but she is also deadly. She is a virgin, but she is a whore. You think you know her, but you don’t come close. 

Through the pages of Lady, Lyon slips, chameleon-like, into disguises, but unlike Cindy Sherman’s ability to efface herself beneath prosthetics and wigs, Lyon’s costume changes come with a knowing wink rather than any real intention to conceal her identity. Photographed by Helmut Newton, she becomes his high-heeled ideal, but in Lady, she’s always herself, even when she’s not. It’s a process not dissimilar to the transformation Mapplethorpe underwent in his own self-portraits, painting his face or picking up a submachine gun, trying on someone else for size but remaining visible behind the lipstick. Even on the dedication page, they appear side by side, in this together, arms folded, sunglasses on, playing at being artists, their characters intact. 

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