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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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