The Pattiverse

2025 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Patti Smith’s debut album Horses, with Robert Mapplethorpe’s black and white cover portrait of the artist posed with her jacket slung over her shoulder, Frank Sinatra-style – ‘the most electrifying image I had ever seen of a woman of my generation’, exclaimed Camille Paglia, who reckoned it one of the most powerful portraits since the French Revolution.