The role of the collector and museum curator Sam Wagstaff in the life and art of Robert Mapplethorpe is explored in the fine 2007 documentary, “Black White + Gray,” which has just been issued on DVD by Arts Alliance America.
Wagstaff was the product of a privileged upbringing in New York City — the family home was on Central Park South — and after attending Yale, he became a major force in the art world in his role as curator at Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum, among other institutions. Wagstaff had the ability to put new artists on the map by including them in his carefully constructed shows.
Writer-director James Crump shows how Wagstaff’s almost unerring taste and talent for finding the next big thing in the art world gave him the power to make careers.
In the 1970s, Wagstaff shifted into private collecting; his fascination with photography helped to elevate what was then viewed as a largely commercial or journalistic tool into a form of high art.
“Black White + Gray” focuses on the 1970s when Wagstaff became Mapplethorpe’s friend and lover. Mapplethorpe was living with poet and musician Patti Smith at the time and the three of them formed a tight bond.
Smith provided Crump with wonderful interview footage in which she talks about the way Wagstaff influenced Mapplethorpe as a budding photographer and Mapplethorpe introduced the older man to Manhattan’s gay sex underground.
The two men explored the S&M clubs that flourished in the pre-gentrification Meatpacking District; what they saw and did there inspired some of Mapplethorpe’s most striking — and most controversial — pictures.
Dominick Dunne contributes a witty and especially informed interview. The Hartford-born writer knew Wagstaff long before he met Mapplethorpe — before the patrician Wadsworth curator developed his taste for drugs and the underground.
Dunne also did a major piece on Mapplethorpe for Vanity Fair just a few months before AIDS claimed the photographer (Wagstaff had died a few years earlier, leaving most of his fortune and vast photo collection to Mapplethorpe).
“Black White + Grey” impresses with its seriousness of intent and the unusually smart comments Crump gathered from a wide array of articulate people who knew Wagstaff.
Writer Joan Juliet Buck gives the film an appropriately wry New York patina with her no-nonsense narration.
