Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe: A Biography by Philip Gefter

Author:Philip Gefter [Gefter, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Artists; Architects; Photographers
ISBN: 9781631490156
Google: NjzxAwAAQBAJ
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2014-11-03T21:19:55+00:00

TWELVE

APPLAUSE

It’s not that Velasquez is better than Rembrandt, but that Velasquez makes Rembrandt better.

—SAM WAGSTAFF1

PRESIDING AT A CANDLELIT TABLE, DASHING IN A PROPER TUXEDO, and basking in the limelight, Sam Wagstaff surveyed a room of more than two hundred people seated at tables spread throughout the main gallery of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. He was the guest of honor at this black-tie dinner on February 4, 1978, which celebrated the opening of “Photographs from the Collection of Sam Wagstaff.” The evening felt like a fitting tribute to his enterprise of the last five years. Sitting nearby in a black velvet gown was Joan Mondale, wife of the vice president of the United States, who had been snidely dubbed “Joan of Art” by the media for her advocacy. Also present was the conservative Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, who told a reporter before dinner that he had “been a photographer for forty years,” adding that he had published books of his photographs,2 although we must presume none that had reflected the historic scope or the aesthetic reach of the one Wagstaff had just produced.

Scattered around the room were Sam’s intimates and familiar friends: Robert, Gerald, Judy Linn, Elaine Mayes, and Jane Smith, who came with her daughter Seton. There were also Paul Walter and Harry Lunn. Wider art world orbits were represented, too, by attendees like Walter Hopps, then curator of the Smithsonian’s National Collection of Fine Arts, and Barbara Jakobson. And, despite his reservations about Susan Sontag’s new book, On Photography,3 Sam understood that the presence of one of the few serious cultural critics and thinkers to have gained notoriety in popular culture gave the evening just that much more intellectual heft. At the same time, the event served as a cotillion, of sorts, for Sam’s arrival as a figure of veneration, not in the manner of the society balls of his youth at which his name and social position gave his presence legitimacy, but because of the art he had chosen to forward that was now being recognized by a national institution, reflecting the substance of his vision—and an earned gravitas.

It was exactly one year since the party Wagstaff had thrown at One Fifth to honor Mapplethorpe’s first official foray into the art world. Paul Richard, the art critic of The Washington Post, led his review of Photographs from the Collection of Sam Wagstaff with this tongue-in-cheek conclusion:

Around 250 guests from the White House and the Congress, the diplomatic corps, corporation boardrooms and the posher streets of Georgetown will attend the seated dinner. The ladies in their gowns, the men in their tuxedos, will—by their very presence among those small, machine-made pictures—be sending us a message. The collecting of photography is socially acceptable; the Establishment approves of photography-as-art.4

After so many years falling short of his own expectations—not only the aspirations imposed on him by Olga, but also the humiliations of being passed over in Hartford and forced out in Detroit—Sam had now become exactly the person he thought he should be.

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