Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe: A Biography
by Philip Gefter
W. W. Norton, 459 pages
Full disclosure: the author of Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe: A Biography has been a supportive colleague of mine over many years. Actually, if anything could disqualify me from writing this review, it would be the two memorably unpleasant phone conversations I had with its main subject, curator and collector Samuel Wagstaff. But this will not affect my review of his biography; the story told is either worthwhile or not, and even the worst rascal’s life may make for interesting reading.
Philip Gefter, photo editor, journalist, and film producer, has produced a book that makes the case for Wagstaff’s importance in elevating photography from its inferior critical and market position in the art world. But the book is also a thoughtful examination of the workings of this world in the later decades of the 20th century. At the same time, because Wagstaff was both a New York patrician and gay, Gefter offers an intriguing account of his double life and that of others in his situation both before and after Stonewall. There was social decorum to observe, and there was an illicit appetite to slake. The late journalist and social commentator Dominick Dunne, a friend of Wagstaff in the 1950s, called him “the deb’s delight.” In Gefter’s words, Wagstaff relied “on his impeccable etiquette to shield his activities in the closet. He kept the expectations of young women from proper families at bay … leaving them with an all-too-polite peck on the cheek in front of the doorman.” Then off into the night the princely Wagstaff would go, frequenting the 1950s Bird Circuit along Third Avenue in the East Fifties “where gay bars with names like the Blue Parrott and the Gold Pheasant were hiding in plain sight.”
Gefter’s larger claim is that Wagstaff was nearly always prescient in his taste, and that his later advocacy on behalf of photography followed from his earlier efforts of the 1960s to advance minimalism and the new New York avant-garde—the Warhol crowd, the Pop artists, and the artist-performers devising ephemeral “happenings” around the city. Even before that, when Wagstaff served as curator at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford and the Detroit Institute of the Arts, he was seen as a kind of knight-errant taking up exotic new forms. At the Wadsworth, he introduced the cool, spare, industrial-style æsthetic of minimalism in a ground-breaking 1964 show Black, White and Gray, which emerged from his acquaintance with New York artists such as Dan Flavin, Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Jim Dine, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Tony Smith, Ad Reinhart, and Robert Rauschenberg.
At least two things moderated criticism of Wagstaff: his social pedigree and his stunning good looks. A graduate of the prep school Hotchkiss and later of Yale, after some years in advertising he took up the study of art history at the esteemed Institute of Fine Arts, New York University’s elite graduate school, whose faculty was a Who’s Who of German-Jewish refugee eminences. Wagstaff’s mentor was Richard Offner, a specialist of trecento and quattrocento Italian art who guided his pupil through the Tuscan hills with lessons on the art of truly examining an æsthetic object. “Looking”—deeply, longingly, persistently—was for Wagstaff both a method and a credo, and Gefter makes a reasonable case for the “erotic” element that such a method represented for a gay man who had to negotiate hidden codes.
A graduate degree from the IFA was no small thing in the 1960s museum world, and Wagstaff parlayed his credentials, his charm with women, and his assured manner to initial success. He did have one fiasco with an earthworks installation by Michael Heizer, Dragged Mass Displacement, where a block of granite was hauled across a section of the Detroit Institute’s lawn, leaving not an artistic impression but a “museum lawn appearing like a very messy construction site.” The entire affair was met with so much public derision that Wagstaff resigned his post in September 1971.
All this may seem beside the point to those who are only interested in Wagstaff as he relates to Robert Mapplethorpe, the photographer who put “gay” into photographs in a way that was certain to shock the bourgeoisie. By the time the two men met, Mapplethorpe and his friend Patti Smith, who would soon be a famous poet and rocker, fashioned themselves up-and-coming denizens of the downtown scene—Max’s Kansas City, the Chelsea Hotel—while Wagstaff, more than twenty years Mapplethorpe’s senior, was already well established. Wagstaff had taken up many artists as personal causes, and had often advocated with a full heart that would later be bruised by an artist’s failure to reciprocate. With Mapplethorpe, he found both an eager acolyte and a gay man who perfectly embodied his physical type—lean and feline, angular and sexy. Mapplethorpe was already creating collages out of found pornographic images slyly referencing Catholic iconography, and while photography was not yet Wagstaff’s thing, he found something in Mapplethorpe’s approach that weakened his resistance to it. In fact, photographing each other became a form of erotic interaction for them.
Many people have wondered how much calculation went into their relationship. Wagstaff became Mapplethorpe’s advocate and patron, buying him the loft that allowed the younger man to conduct his photographic practice as a professional, while Mapplethorpe helped Wagstaff shed the last vestiges of his fancy upbringing with its superficial decorum and half-truths. Writes Gefter: “Sam could finally integrate his private desires with his public identity, and he began to reside more completely in his body, exhibiting … at least a tentative sexual openness that was astonishing for a man of his social background.”
The couple became a recognized item, spending time with each other hand-in-glove. One friend maintained that Wagstaff was looking for a young man to “spoil,” and Mapplethorpe, deeply ambitious and aware of the politics of the art world, was looking for someone who could take him to the right places. Gefter never uses the term, so I will. Mapplethorpe was a climber, and while he had real talent, it’s an open question whether he would have gone so far so fast without Wagstaff. Edmund White sees the exchange between them in a manner worthy of Colette during the fin de siècle: “I think Robert was a very clever, genteel, long-range opportunist … in the way that millions of women have been since the beginning of time—you marry a rich husband. … There’s nothing sinister about it.” As for Mapplethorpe’s taking Wagstaff’s money to buy his loft, White again takes the Continental view: “I think it’s perfectly normal for a poor Catholic boy from Long Island, who’s eaten up by ambition, to hook his wagon to that particular star.”
By 1973, Wagstaff was exploring photography with the zeal of a convert to a cause. He had recently discovered Edward Steichen’s 1904 photograph The Flatiron. The painterly qualities of the colored tints in two different versions of the image, combined with the building’s assertive modernism, struck a chord with Wagstaff, who considered “subject” and “image” here to be in perfect balance. He appreciated the image as representing a pure moment of transition between the “mechanical and handmade” and the “representational and abstract.” Soon he began to explore realms of 19th-century photography from England, France, and the U.S. (Gustave Le Grey, Henri Le Secq, Hill and Adamson, Felice Beato, John Thompson, Carlton Watkins, et al.)—photographs that had been abandoned to musty archives and family attics. Indeed, he became the advance guard in a network of dealers and collectors who came to form a loose cartel that frankly manipulated the London photography auctions to their own benefit.
Gefter is very good on presenting the various dramatis personæ of that heady period when large photography collections were being amassed: men like the young go-getter and private dealer Daniel Wolf; or the elegant Pierre Apraxine, curator of the Gilman Paper Company Collection; or Harry Lunn of Washington, D.C.’s Graphics International, a bald man of gnomic mien who commanded a room and bore the whiff of his past work for the CIA.
Gefter doesn’t stint on the aristocratic insouciance with which Wagstaff conducted his home life, portraying his subject as representative of a certain “dash” of the socially privileged: the sparely furnished penthouse apartment at One Fifth Avenue that looks south over Washington Square Park and north to the silk stocking precincts of his parents’ tonier Upper East Side. Wagstaff invested well in real estate and lived a kind of “fuck you” bohemianism, adopting the look of a well-tended hippie for a number of years in the 1970s. Nutty in his pursuit of new photographs to pore over and dissect, at a certain point he even wore out the young Mapplethorpe, who was eager to ingest the full history of the medium in which he would later produce his own highly refined iterations of the perfect tulip, the perfect black torso or penis, the perfect portrait of the downtown arriviste.
As things turned out, Mapplethorpe’s use of Wagstaff for social climbing wasn’t entirely one-sided. When Mapplethorpe finally grabbed the brass ring with simultaneous inaugural exhibitions of his alternately elegant and sexually provocative work, solidifying his reputation as a naughty altar boy, Wagstaff hosted a huge “coming out party” at One Fifth Avenue’s Art Deco restaurant and bar, the downtown place to see and be seen. The guest list included fashion legend Diana Vreeland, designers Halston and Elsa Peretti, the outsize photography collector-dealer Harry Lunn, gallerists Charles Cowles and Klaus Kertess, artists Judy Linn and Lynne David, and British heiresses Catherine Guinness and Caterine Milinaire. Diane von Furstenberg brought the young Arnold Schwarzenegger along.
One chronicler of the age had a particular take on the spectacle: “Fran Lebowitz, then a writer for Andy Warhol’s Interview, respected the pursuit of art as something pure and true. She had known Mapplethorpe as a struggling artist in the back room of Max’s Kansas City and considered the occasion not as the beginning of his legitimacy, but as the end: “‘I thought the party was a joke,’ she said, likening Robert in that context to a once rebellious girl ‘showing you her big diamond ring and telling you she’s marrying a rich doctor and moving to Greenwich, Connecticut.’” Today, Wagstaff and Mapplethorpe might have cashed in as a cable reality show.
After the sale of his collection to the Getty, and before his slow withering from AIDS, Wagstaff moved on to a new area of collecting and market-building: “æsthetic silver” from England, the Continent, and the U.S., including serving pieces like coffee pots, butter dishes, napkin rings, a Tiffany tray. Gefter argues that Wagstaff was moved to recognize early and deeply these sparkling artisanal works otherwise languishing in the obscurity of the arcane, theorizing that his homosexuality is what drove his desire to retrieve the “unconventional and unexplored … to invent a parallel universe of symbols and meanings—such as camp, for example—in a society that had for so long rejected his kind.” But we may also wonder if there’s something peculiarly “gay” in this need to acquire and collect anything at all. I cannot escape the ghoulish sense that all this acquisitiveness was Wagstaff’s race against time, as if he might escape the final reckoning since, after all, there was always yet one more object out there to be admired, studied, and catalogued.
Allen Ellenzweig is a contributor to the new book Storyteller: The Photographs of Duane Michals, which is reviewed in this issue.
