Synopses & Reviews
Now recalled as the infamous lover and patron of legendary photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, Sam Wagstaff here takes center stage as a leading American intellectual and cultural visionary in his own right. Philip Gefter's epochal biography traces Wagstaff 's evolution from society "bachelor" of the 1940s to his emergence as rebellious curator, initially at Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum, where he mounted the first exhibition of Minimalist art, and then at the Detroit Institute of Arts, where he famously took on the trustees. In 1972, his fateful meeting with twenty-five-year-old, Queens-born Mapplethorpe would lead to his crowning legacy as world-class photography collector and cultural arbiter. Positioning Wagstaff 's personal life against the rise of photography as a major art form, the formation of the gay rights movement, and New York just before and during the age of AIDS, Gefter writes of an intensely passionate, romantic odyssey and a celebrated union that would help transform contemporary art history.
Review
"I just couldn't stop reading this book!...Sam Wagstaff was the ultimate collector--of talent, of beauty, of silver, of boys. He had everything: looks, taste, money. He almost invented the idea of photography as art, valuable art worth collecting. This is a book not only about the New York art scene of the 70s but also about an entire generation." Edmund White, author of Genet: A Biography
Review
"Sam Wagstaff was a leonine figure who stood at the intersection of gay life and the art world and brought glamor and daring to both. Philip Gefter's eloquent biography captures the challenges and the thrills of this dramatic life. It is a smart, sexy biography of a brilliant, charismatic man; it is also a portrait of a time when our ideas of art and our attitudes toward sexuality were in extraordinary flux." Andrew Solomon, National Book Award-winning author of Far from the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity
Review
"Gefter delivers the most persuasive account yet of how Wagstaff encouraged a small coterie of likeminded collectors... who raised vintage photographs from quaint curiosities to a 'serious' artistic medium. Mapplethorpe was the inadvertent catalyst of this historic shift." Martin Filler
Review
"This thorough, entertaining biography portrays a blue blood who charmed East Coast society but also loved to scandalize... Gefter captures the brilliance of that world and its decline in the face of AIDS." The New York Review of Books
Review
"An admiring and absorbing biography... As cultural history, Wagstaff's life story parallels the ascent of the gay rights movement in New York. Gefter tracks the social changes that allowed Wagstaff to escape the charades and debasements of living as a closeted homosexual in the intolerant past." New Yorker
Synopsis
Biography on a grand cultural level, here is the long-awaited story of Sam Wagstaff and his indelible influence on the world of late-twentieth-century art.
Synopsis
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 Robert Mapplethorpe, the once infamous photographer, 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.
About the Author
Philip Gefter was on staff at The New York Times for over fifteen years, where he wrote regularly about photography. His essays are collected in the book Photography After Frank (2009). He lives in New York City.