Gefter draws on interviews and considerable research to create a richly detailed portrait of a connoisseur who defied...
The life of an influential champion of photography as an art form.
Educated at Yale and the NYU Institute of Fine Arts, Sam Wagstaff (1922-1987) was a prominent art collector and promoter from the 1960s, when he was hired as curator of painting, prints and drawings at the Wadsworth Atheneum, until his death from complications due to AIDS. Coming of age in the 1950s, he became an expert, former New York Times staff writer Gefter (Photography After Frank, 2009) writes, “at leading the double life of a homosexual, relying on his impeccable etiquette to shield his activities in the closet.” In his circles of artists, writers, dancers and musicians, the closet included Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Allen Ginsberg and John Cage. Although these gay men socialized easily among themselves, some, like Wagstaff, lived behind a “veil of fear about being discovered.” Not until 1973, when the American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a pathology, did many gay men begin to feel some freedom. By that time, Wagstaff had become the highly visible lover, and generous patron, of the young Robert Mapplethorpe. Wagstaff was fascinated both by Mapplethorpe’s art and his sexual allure. Mapplethorpe had been involved with wealthy men before, but no one as charming, handsome and appealing as Wagstaff. Besides, the writer Edmund White noted, “he was also very rich, and…very powerful in the art world.” Although others saw Mapplethorpe as a bit of a hustler, Wagstaff was smitten, and he bought him a Hasselblad camera and a loft. The relationship pushed Wagstaff into the world of photography, where he stood out as a collector and opinion maker. In 1978, the eminent Corcoran Gallery mounted a photography show drawn from his collection; by the 1980s, he had become internationally famous.
Gefter draws on interviews and considerable research to create a richly detailed portrait of a connoisseur who defied convention in the art world and in his own life.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-87140-437-4
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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