gorgik9
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Sam Wagstaff (1921-1987)
He was handsome, well educated and had excellent connections to all parts of the American and European artworld; he was also rich - and a homosexual man living a difficult life in the Big Apple of the 1950s and 60s. Samuel Jones Wagstaff Jr (1921-1987) descended from a patrician New York family with roots we can follow back to the 17th century, a family who owned substantial land properties in Manhattan, and he was the son of Samuel Jones Wagstaff Sr and Olga Piorkowska. He was not only a troubled young man and a bonafide US Navy war hero present at Omaha Beach on D-Day 1944, but also a man destined to become pretty wealthy sooner or later.
After having left the Navy and graduated from Yale Sam went into the advertising business on Madison Avenue, and found in a few years that this was a job he hated and detested, while he at the same time became skilled at living the double life of a 1950s deeply closeted gay man. On the one hand he was a big favourite among the posh young society women in the annual Debutant Ball, but the favourites of Sam's own choice were men of his own age.
In the mid 1950s he got fully fed up with being an Ad Man and wanted to turn his professional life in a very different direction - he wanted to go into the world of fine arts! Thus he asked his wealthy mother Olga to support him financially to go back to the university, and more specifically to enroll at the Insttute of Fine Arts at New York University in 1957. His most important professor was Richard Offner, who was one of the foremost experts on Italian painting of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, taking Wagstaff on several expeditions to Europe, in particular trips to the hill towns of Tuscany. Sam thus learned the rigorous methods of art history and got lots of transatlantic connections in the artworld.
After a brief intership at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Sam was hired as a curator at the oldest public museum in the US: The Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, and in 1964 he organized the exhibition "Black, White and Grey" which was the first museum survey of Minimalist Art:
A couple of years later he arranged sculptor Tony Smith's first museum exhibition:
After some arguments with the board of trustees at Wadsworth Atheneum in 1968, he moved on to work at Detroit Institute of Art where he staid as a curator until 1971.
While Wagstaff's deepest expertise as an art historian was in late medieval and renaissance art, he was also very much in touch with what was happening in contemporary art. He started working in Hartford at precisely the same moment in time when Andy Warhol started becoming famous as "The king of Pop Art" - Wagstaff met Warhol and they became good friends, but he also befriended a large number of other artists just at the cusp of becoming well known: Tony Smith, Ray Johnson, Richard Tuttle, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Robert Indiana, Cy Twombly and many more.
Sam got into a big brawl with the Detroit Institute's directory in 1971, concerning his decision to acquisit an "Earth Art"-project by Michael Heizer, titled Dragged Mass Displacement centered on a 30 ton slab of granite. The basic idea was that the gigantic slab would be hauled and sunk in a pre-digged hole in the ground, but what happened was that the immaculate museum lawn was virtually destroyed by all tha violent hauling of the granite monolith - which also turned Wagstaff into a persona non grata in Detroit.
So it was time for Sam to go back to New York where he would relatively soon meet his destiny, or in other words: he was soon about to meet Robert Mapplethorpe.
Francesco Scavullo: Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe, 1973.
When Sam met Robert in 1972 he was 50 years old while Robert was 25, or in other words: he was twice Mapplethorpe's age and could have been his father - with a margin. If there's one important thing to understand it is - in my opinion - that they mutually changed each others. While I'm pretty sure that Robert would sooner or later have become an artist of importance also without the intimate interaction with Sam, I definitely don't think that his success would have been so expedient, and - more importantly - that his success in the artworld would have been with photography as his preferred artistic medium. I do think that Sam Wagstaff's economic, social and intellectual muscles were necessary to bring this change about. Or to look at it from another angle: I think that Robert and Sam was the chemical reaction necessary to make Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, Wolfgang Tillmans and Anthony Goicolea possible.
On the other hand it was mostly thanks to Robert that Sam stopped being so uptight about his sexuality - Robert was the necessity pushing Sam to fully come out as a gay man, and it was Robert who moved Sam to re-think his ideas about photography as a fine art. So I'll repeat my basic central point: they changed the contemporary artworld together.
Wolfgang Tillmans
Anthony Goicolea
Jeff Wall
Getting a serious interest for photography also meant that San acquired his own camera and started making photos, including a large number of self-portraits of various kinds.
Some of them funny faces...
...some more ordinary selfies...
...and some with a strong auto-erotic theme.
But himself was obviously not the only motive and you wont be surprised by finding pictures of Robert...
The very elegant male nude below is Mark Kaminsky in 1975:
I'll end this post with a picture showing Sam Wagstaff doing what made the most effect: buying classical photos at an international auction at Sotheby's, London.
He was handsome, well educated and had excellent connections to all parts of the American and European artworld; he was also rich - and a homosexual man living a difficult life in the Big Apple of the 1950s and 60s. Samuel Jones Wagstaff Jr (1921-1987) descended from a patrician New York family with roots we can follow back to the 17th century, a family who owned substantial land properties in Manhattan, and he was the son of Samuel Jones Wagstaff Sr and Olga Piorkowska. He was not only a troubled young man and a bonafide US Navy war hero present at Omaha Beach on D-Day 1944, but also a man destined to become pretty wealthy sooner or later.
After having left the Navy and graduated from Yale Sam went into the advertising business on Madison Avenue, and found in a few years that this was a job he hated and detested, while he at the same time became skilled at living the double life of a 1950s deeply closeted gay man. On the one hand he was a big favourite among the posh young society women in the annual Debutant Ball, but the favourites of Sam's own choice were men of his own age.
In the mid 1950s he got fully fed up with being an Ad Man and wanted to turn his professional life in a very different direction - he wanted to go into the world of fine arts! Thus he asked his wealthy mother Olga to support him financially to go back to the university, and more specifically to enroll at the Insttute of Fine Arts at New York University in 1957. His most important professor was Richard Offner, who was one of the foremost experts on Italian painting of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, taking Wagstaff on several expeditions to Europe, in particular trips to the hill towns of Tuscany. Sam thus learned the rigorous methods of art history and got lots of transatlantic connections in the artworld.
After a brief intership at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Sam was hired as a curator at the oldest public museum in the US: The Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, and in 1964 he organized the exhibition "Black, White and Grey" which was the first museum survey of Minimalist Art:
A couple of years later he arranged sculptor Tony Smith's first museum exhibition:
After some arguments with the board of trustees at Wadsworth Atheneum in 1968, he moved on to work at Detroit Institute of Art where he staid as a curator until 1971.
While Wagstaff's deepest expertise as an art historian was in late medieval and renaissance art, he was also very much in touch with what was happening in contemporary art. He started working in Hartford at precisely the same moment in time when Andy Warhol started becoming famous as "The king of Pop Art" - Wagstaff met Warhol and they became good friends, but he also befriended a large number of other artists just at the cusp of becoming well known: Tony Smith, Ray Johnson, Richard Tuttle, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Robert Indiana, Cy Twombly and many more.
Sam got into a big brawl with the Detroit Institute's directory in 1971, concerning his decision to acquisit an "Earth Art"-project by Michael Heizer, titled Dragged Mass Displacement centered on a 30 ton slab of granite. The basic idea was that the gigantic slab would be hauled and sunk in a pre-digged hole in the ground, but what happened was that the immaculate museum lawn was virtually destroyed by all tha violent hauling of the granite monolith - which also turned Wagstaff into a persona non grata in Detroit.
So it was time for Sam to go back to New York where he would relatively soon meet his destiny, or in other words: he was soon about to meet Robert Mapplethorpe.
Francesco Scavullo: Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe, 1973.
When Sam met Robert in 1972 he was 50 years old while Robert was 25, or in other words: he was twice Mapplethorpe's age and could have been his father - with a margin. If there's one important thing to understand it is - in my opinion - that they mutually changed each others. While I'm pretty sure that Robert would sooner or later have become an artist of importance also without the intimate interaction with Sam, I definitely don't think that his success would have been so expedient, and - more importantly - that his success in the artworld would have been with photography as his preferred artistic medium. I do think that Sam Wagstaff's economic, social and intellectual muscles were necessary to bring this change about. Or to look at it from another angle: I think that Robert and Sam was the chemical reaction necessary to make Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, Wolfgang Tillmans and Anthony Goicolea possible.
On the other hand it was mostly thanks to Robert that Sam stopped being so uptight about his sexuality - Robert was the necessity pushing Sam to fully come out as a gay man, and it was Robert who moved Sam to re-think his ideas about photography as a fine art. So I'll repeat my basic central point: they changed the contemporary artworld together.
Wolfgang Tillmans
Anthony Goicolea
Jeff Wall
Getting a serious interest for photography also meant that San acquired his own camera and started making photos, including a large number of self-portraits of various kinds.
Some of them funny faces...
...some more ordinary selfies...
...and some with a strong auto-erotic theme.
But himself was obviously not the only motive and you wont be surprised by finding pictures of Robert...
The very elegant male nude below is Mark Kaminsky in 1975:
I'll end this post with a picture showing Sam Wagstaff doing what made the most effect: buying classical photos at an international auction at Sotheby's, London.
Last edited:
ented negative respons we can start understanding how extremely controversial the work of Robert Mapplethorpe and all the other gay photographers/artists of the 1970s was - something I think that we in the age of ubiquitous nude-selfies, cock-selfies and homemade fuck videos have difficulties comprehending.
