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Long overshadowed by the reputation of his more controversial partner, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, this is the long-awaited story of Sam Wagstaff and his indelible influence on the world of late-twentieth-century art.
Sam Wagstaff, the legendary curator, collector, and patron of the arts, emerges as a cultural visionary in this groundbreaking biography. Even today remembered primarily as the mentor and lover of the infamous photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, Wagstaff, in fact, had an incalculable — and largely overlooked — influence on the world of contemporary art and photography, and on the evolution of gay identity in the latter part of the twentieth century.
Born in New York City in 1921 into a notable family, Wagstaff followed an arc that was typical of a young man of his class. He attended Yale University, served in the navy, and would follow in step with his Ivy League classmates to the "gentleman's profession," as an ad executive on Madison Avenue. With his unmistakably good looks, he projected an aura of glamour and was cited by newspapers as one of the most eligible bachelors of the late 1940s. Such accounts proved deceiving, for Wagstaff was forced to live in the closet, his homosexuality only revealed to a small circle of friends. Increasingly uncomfortable with his career and this double life, he abandoned advertising, turned to the formal study of art history, and embarked on a radical personal transformation that was in perfect harmony with the tumultuous social, cultural, and sexual upheavals of the 1960s.
Wagstaff became a museum curator in 1961, mounting the first ever museum show of minimal art, while lending his early support to Andy Warhol among many others. After returning to New York City in the early 70's, the fifty-year-old Wagstaff met the twenty-five-year-old Robert Mapplethorpe, then living with Patti Smith. What at first appeared to be a sexual dalliance became their now historic lifelong romance, in which Mapplethorpe would foster Wagstaff's own burgeoning interest in contemporary photography and Wagstaff would help secure Mapplethorpe's reputation in the art world. In spite of their profound class differences, the artistic union between the philanthropically inclined Wagstaff and the prodigiously talented Mapplethorpe would help reshape contemporary art history.
Positioning Wagstaff's personal life against the rise of photography as a major art form and the simultaneous formation of the gay rights movement, Philip Gefter's absorbing biography provides a searing portrait of New York just before and during the age of AIDS. The result is a definitive and memorable portrait of a man and an era.
Author: Philip Gefter
Paperback, 480 Pages, Orig. Published 2014, This Edition Published November 2015