The more famous Mapplethorpe is moved aside to give Sam Wagstaff the spotlight. But the best photography in the world steals the show.
Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe could not have been any more different. Wagstaff was a rich Yale preppie who abandoned assured success as an entrenched advertising executive after he fell in love with the New York art scene of the 1960s. Mapplethorpe was a scrappy hustler from the working class side of the tracks who saw his opportunities and took them. These two most different people shared an affection for each other. But more than that they shared an obsession with what would become one of the legendary periods in New York history.
The spate of recent films re-hashing the renaissance of the chaotic and yeasty environment of the 1950 to 1980 art scene in New York has yielded mixed results. In fact there is a sense about “Black White + Gray” that it knows it is beginning to reach the bottom of the once-fertile soil plowed to excess by flicks like 2006’s “Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus,” (the book by Patricia Bosworth, “Diane Arbus: A Biography” has many times the information of the film).
The year 2000’s “Pollock,” (likewise, the book by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith is more informative), the myriad Andy Warhol films and 2006’s Edie Sedgewick doc “Factory Girl” have almost played out the gold mine of history that New York made before the gentrification of the 1990s.
In spite of the insipient overkill, the Mapplethorpe name is overwhelming. We are just too curious about what delightful conservative-bashing blasphemies the story might articulate. Certainly Mapplethorpe is the reigning champion of the last several decades when it came to driving the religious right to distraction. He managed to drive them crazy years after his death, as his photographs are denounced and banned from coast to coast. Surely he is laughing from his grave. Hopefully, Sam Wagstaff is laughing as well.
In spite of the Mapplethorpe fame, there are very few people who know the vital role that collector Wagstaff played in the young artist’s success. In was Wagstaff who put a camera in his hands and told him to use it. It was also Wagstaff who committed himself to a Herculean photographic collection that included thousands of the best images in the world---a collection that was, by itself, a superlative education in the art of photography.
This film is a shot at balancing the scales a bit between the fame of the two men: Mapplethorpe who had plenty and Wagstaff who had very little but arguably did more. He sold his extensive collection of photographs to the Getty Museum in the early 1980s for a fortune and then switched obsessions to American silver for the last five years of his life. In that short time he amassed a collection of silver that sold for a second fortune at the time of his death, 1987. His partner, collaborator and far more successful promoter Mapplethorpe died two years later in 1989. Both died of AIDS, succumbing like dozens of other stars in the first days of the American discovery of the HIV virus.
Expertly narrated by Joan Juliet Buck, this film provides fascinating interviews with experts on the American and international art scene of the 1950s through the 1980s. It also provides excellent commentary about the art and science of photography and photographic criticism. The fact remains that Sam Wagstaff was not only a collector of great photographs but was a definer of great photos. He saw greatness in photographs where no one lese did until years after he publicized them and put them before the public.
The film features extensive interviews with punk rock pioneer superstar Patti Smith who lived with the two men and was one of their closest friends for years. Other interviews with Truman Capote, Dominick Dunne, Henry Geldzahler, Ralph Gibson and great archival footage from the Dick Cavette show make the film fascinating viewing from start to finish.
A must-see for all aficionados of 1960s through 1980s art history in general and New York buffs in particular. But the best part is the fantastic photographs lovingly chosen that steal the show.
Release: October 19, 2007
USA
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