GLR May June

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 Ste- ichen’s 1904 photograph The Flatiron . The painterly qualities of the colored tints in two different versions of the image, com- bined 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 hand- made” 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 net- work 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 per- sonæ 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 Wash- ington, 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 sub- ject as representative of a certain “dash” of the socially privi- leged: 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 down- town 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 ex- hibitions 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, design- ers Halston and Elsa Peretti, the outsize photography collector-

May–June 2015

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