GLR May June

BOOKS

Before There Was Mapplethorpe

F ULL DISCLOSURE : the author of Wagstaff: Before and After Map- plethorpe: A Biography has been a supportive colleague of mine over many years. Actually, if anything could disqualify me from writing this re- view, it would be the two memorably un- pleasant phone conversations I had with its main subject, curator and collector Samuel

prep school Hotchkiss and later of Yale, after some years in advertising he took up the study of art history at the esteemed In- stitute of Fine Arts, New York University’s elite graduate school, whose faculty was a Who’s Who of German-Jewish refugee em- inences. Wagstaff’s mentor was Richard Offner, a specialist of trecento and quattro- cento Italian art who guided his pupil

A LLEN E LLENZWEIG

Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe: A Biography by Philip Gefter W.W. Norton, 459 pages

through the Tuscan hills with lessons on the art of truly exam- ining an æsthetic object. “Looking”—deeply, longingly, per- sistently—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 suc- cess. 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 in- terested 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 Map- plethorpe’s senior, was already well established. Wagstaff had taken up many artists as personal causes, and had often advo- cated 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 phys- ical 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 Map- plethorpe’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 ad- vocate and patron, buying him the loft that allowed the younger man to conduct his photographic practice as a pro- fessional, 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

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 ex- amination 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 ac- count of his double life and that of others in his situation both before and after Stonewall. There was social decorum to ob- serve, and there was an illicit appetite to slake. The late jour- nalist 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, fre- quenting 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 pre- scient in his taste, and that his later advocacy on behalf of pho- tography 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 devis- ing ephemeral “happenings” around the city. Even before that, when Wagstaff served as curator at the WadsworthAtheneum 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 æs- thetic 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 so- cial pedigree and his stunning good looks. A graduate of the

Allen Ellenzweig is a contributor to the new book Storyteller: The Pho- tographs of Duane Michals, which is reviewed in this issue.

30

The Gay & Lesbian Review / WORLDWIDE