
Wagstaff : Before and After Mapplethorpe
A Biography
written by Philip Gefter
W W Norton & Company | ISBN 9780871404374
Hardback
$49.95
Member’s price: $44.96
Here is the long-awaited story of Sam Wagstaff and his indelible influence on the world of late-twentieth-century art.
Recalled as the lover and patron of Robert Mapplethorpe, Sam Wagstaff here takes centre stage as a leading American intellectual and cultural visionary. Philip Gefter traces Wagstaff’s evolution from society "bachelor" of the 1940s to his emergence as rebellious curator. In 1972, his meeting with twenty-five-year-old Mapplethorpe, would lead to his legacy as world-class photography collector and cultural arbiter.
Positioning Wagstaff’s personal life against the rise of photography as a major art form and the simultaneous formation of the gay rights movement, Gefter’s absorbing biography provides a searing portrait of New York just before and during the age of AIDS. The result is a definitive and memorable portrait of a man and an era.
Artist: Robert Mapplethorpe
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