A Well-Tempered ‘Eye’

In my first class as a graduate student of art history nearly 25 years ago, our professor, a distinguished medievalist, projected a slide of an obscure work of art on the screen at the front of the classroom and challenged the eager neophytes seated before it. What, he wanted to know, are you looking at?

There was much nervous shifting in seats. The image showed a small ivory relief, apparently dating from the Middle Ages and probably the ornamental cover to a fabulous book. But who knew which one? Or in which century it was produced? Or in which part of Europe?

A few brave souls ventured apprehensive guesses, but each surmise was greeted with a sharp, professorial “No!” Guesses quickly dwindled into embarrassed nothingness, eventually to be replaced by a loud and lengthy silence.

“What you are looking at,” our bearded mentor finally announced, weariness lacing his voice, “is a photograph. And don’t ever forget it.”

A photograph. Of course. We were looking at a photograph.

There was nothing medieval before our eyes at all, save the illusion of an elegant old ivory recorded in a modern photographic slide. As students in a field where discerning the visual evidence counts as ground zero, we were effectively being cautioned against forgetting the ubiquitous photographic modes of seeing that daily intervene in our perception, characterizing our experience of modern life.

I thought of that class the other day when I visited “The Eye of Sam Wagstaff” at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu. The compelling show convinces you Wagstaff would have answered the professor’s question correctly and without hesitation.

The first picture in the exhibition, which considers the huge, influential photography collection amassed by the late New York-based collector, shows the half-dome ceiling of the apse of the famous Italian church of Sant’ Apollinare in Classe, near Ravenna. The apse is adorned with a beautiful Byzantine mosaic, made around 549, showing the church’s patron saint surmounted by Christ the Redeemer.

The frontally composed black-and-white photograph, made sometime between 1890 and 1920 by an obscure documentarian named Fratelli Alinari, seems unremarkable. It dutifully underscores the mosaic imagery of flat, two-dimensional space and silhouetted figures.

The second photograph in the show, from circa 1888, subtly elaborates the first. A large, formal self-portrait of Henry Hamilton Bennett with his daughters and son shows the family arrayed before a framed landscape painting hanging on the rear wall; a second painting stands on an easel at the left, with a small sculptural grouping on a table at the right. Bennett, like some American version of a mythological figure identifiable by his attributes, surrounds himself with his progeny and with art.

The photographs by Alinari and Bennett quietly introduce the unmistakable tensions created between traditional Western forms of art--mosaics, paintings, sculptures--and the modern medium of photography. Look at them together, as Wagstaff would, and you see the camera confronting established ideas of art.

Today, when photographically based art is everywhere to be seen and galleries that specialize in photographs are common, it’s difficult to remember just how recent is the art-world embrace of photography. Wagstaff, like most people, hardly gave photography more than cursory respect before the 1970s.

Yet, by the time he sold his collection to the Getty in 1984--one of seven private collections that formed the cornerstone of the museum’s new, instantly distinguished department of photographs--he had amassed some 7,500 individual prints (that’s buying at a clip averaging about two pictures a day, every day, for 10 years) and twice that many additional images in portfolios and books.

Wagstaff is a pivotal figure in the institutionalization of photography as a mainstream art medium. Wealthy son of a patrician lawyer, he worked in advertising before deciding to study the history of European painting and sculpture at New York University. Then, in 1961, he embarked on a successful career as an art museum curator, first at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., and subsequently at the Detroit Institute of the Arts.

Ten years later Wagstaff suddenly quit the museum field, returned to New York and, in 1973, began to buy photographs. He died in 1987 at age 66.

The Getty exhibition provocatively demonstrates that his regard for photography grew from his perception of its complicated relationship to traditional artistic ideas. Wagstaff seems always to have been aware of art’s established hierarchies, but even within the photographic world he helped democratize perception by giving serious consideration to vernacular photographs, like the Alinari.

The show’s 43 works consist mostly of individual photographs, shown in pairs. Each pair, often by different photographers, famous or little-known, is readily identifiable by their matching frames. Many couplings duplicate those made in a prescient show and catalog Wagstaff produced in 1977.

They include a variety of compelling, sometimes funny juxtapositions, such as a picture of a towheaded little boy reclining on a love seat (by Lewis Carroll, circa 1857) next to one of a hippopotamus reclining by a pool at the zoo (by Count de Montizon, from 1855). Rarely in the history of art have little boys or exotic animals been portrayed as sensual odalisques.

On one hand the pairings proclaim a commitment to what could be called “comparative photography.” No photograph, given its status as a fragmentary image of reality, can be seen as an autonomous truth. The pictures of the hippo and the little boy resonate against all the other unseen pictures of harem girls.

On the other hand, the idea of juxtaposing photographs to understand them takes us right back to the traditional art history classroom. There, photographic slides of works of art are almost invariably paired for study.

One small disappointment in the Getty show comes in its coy acknowledgment of the critical role in the development of Wagstaff’s “eye” played by a man the exhibition brochure and a wall text describe as “his friend Robert Mapplethorpe.” It’s rather late in the day to be employing genteel euphemisms to describe Mapplethorpe, the photographer who was actually Wagstaff’s lover and companion.

Still, if a larger, more cheerful complaint is to be made, it’s simply that the small show is provocative enough to leave you wanting a fuller accounting of Wagstaff’s eye for photography. Selecting 43 pictures from among the many thousands of possibilities leaves a lot of stones unturned--photography out of the corner of Wagstaff’s eye?--while a book could be written on his role in legitimizing photographic history as both a discipline for study and a market.

Perhaps the Getty’s move into its expansive new home in Brentwood next December will bring us more. Meanwhile, check out the acute Wagstaff profile by Hilton Als in the Jan. 13 issue of the New Yorker.

* J. Paul Getty Museum, 17985 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu, (310) 458-2003, through April 6.