Sam Wagstaff

Samuel Wagstaff was born on November 4, 1921, in New York City. Wagstaff, a grandson of New York State Senator Alfred Wagstaff Jr., a fashion illustrator who had worked for ''Harper's Bazaar and Vogue'' and was previously married to Arthur Paul Thomas. He had one sibling, a sister, Judith (Mrs. Thomas Lewis Jefferson). After growing up on Central Park South, attending the Hotchkiss School and graduating from Yale University, and being a fixture on the debutante circuit, Wagstaff joined the US Navy in 1941 as an ensign, where he took part in the D-day landing at Omaha Beach in World War II. He later worked in the field of advertising in the 1950s, which he hated. He returned to school to study Renaissance art at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts, however, and turned his energies to the art world. ==Career==

In 1959, a David E. Finley art history fellowship took him to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. He served as curator of contemporary art at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, from 1961 to 1968. In January 1964, he organized the show Black White + Gray, choosing exhibits presenting what he described as "the sparse aesthetic shared by a number of artists whose work was pared down to a minimum". It is now often referred to as the first survey of Minimalist Art. In 1968, when he was not chosen for the position of museum director, Wagstaff left Hartford for the Detroit Institute of Arts staying to 1971. In addition to his curatorial work, Wagstaff was a noted collector, just like his father, who collected ephemera. After a conflict with the Detroit Institute of Arts' board of trustees over an earthwork by Michael Heizer, which had destroyed the immaculate museum lawn, he moved back to New York. After meeting Robert Mapplethorpe in 1972 and seeing the exhibition The Painterly Photograph, 1890-1914 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1973, Wagstaff became convinced that photographs were the most unrecognized and, possibly, the most valuable works of art. He began selling his collection of paintings, using the proceeds to buy 19th-century American, British, and French photography. Then, influenced by Mapplethorpe, Wagstaff's taste veered toward the daring, and he began to depart from established names in search of new talent. His collection was soon recognized as one of the finest private holdings in the United States. In 1984 Wagstaff's photography collection went to the J. Paul Getty Museum, for a reported price in the neighborhood of $5 million. Saying that he needed the challenge of building another collection, Wagstaff turned to 19th-century American silver. A show of more than 100 examples from his silver collection opened on March 20, 1987, at the New-York Historical Society. Between 1976 and 1986, Wagstaff donated his personal papers to the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. In 2008, the bulk of these papers were digitized and made available online (see the Samuel J. Wagstaff Papers, 1932–1985). ==Personal life==

's Studio in Manhattan Wagstaff met photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in 1972 at a party, beginning a fifteen-year relationship that would last until Wagstaff's death, described as "first a kind of marriage, sexual and artistic, then a friendship". ==Posthumous legacy==

A fund in Wagstaff's name for the purchase of photographs was started in 1987 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art by art dealer Daniel Wolf. In 2022, Zachary Quinto played a character in American Horror Story: NYC named Sam Jones who is loosely inspired by Wagstaff's life as an art curator, his relationship with Mapplethorpe, and his death from HIV/AIDS. ==See also==