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Every great artist needs a patron, the guiding light (and wallet) that keeps him from poverty and obscurity. And hey, if he happens to be a beautiful blue-blooded bachelor to boot? All the better for you!
See, for example, this New York Times review of Black White + Gray, a documentary about Robert Mapplethorpe and his partner-slash-curator, Sam Wagstaff, of the Manhattan Wagstaffs:
[T]he Wagstaff mystique deepens around his relationship to Robert Mapplethorpe, his lover, to whom he was also mentor and career impresario. Mr. Mapplethorpe, 25 years his junior, was the bad boy photographer who scandalized the National Endowment for the Arts with his formal and highly aestheticized homoerotic photographs, which were given a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Art in 1988, securing his legacy. Still, obscenity charges were brought against the Cincinnati Museum of Art when it mounted an exhibition of Mr. Mapplethorpe's work in 1990. Mr. Wagstaff himself affectionately called him "my sly little pornographer."
Mr. Mapplethorpe, a young artist from a working-class neighborhood in Queens, was making elaborate constructions with beaded jewelry when he and the patrician Mr. Wagstaff, who had been a well-known curator at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, met at a party in Manhattan in the early 1970s....
Philippe Garner, a director of Christie's in London and a friend of both men, says in the film: "My guess is that Robert gave Sam the courage to explore areas of his personality, to savor a darker kind of lifestyle than he would have done on his own. He unlocked a dark genie within him."
The film opens in New York next week at the Tribeca festival.
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