Black White + Gray.

"Most obviously, [James] Crump's [Black White + Gray] is a tribute to a nearly forgotten man, the art collector and curator Sam Wagstaff, who was Robert Mapplethorpe's lover and (according to many sources) orchestrated much of the legendary photographer's career, including his notorious shift from portraiture to pornography," writes Andrew O'Hehir at Salon. "It's also a highly ambiguous portrait of a hedonistic New York era that was artistically and culturally fertile, but also immeasurably narcissistic and, not incidentally, self-destructive. Finally, Crump appears to argue that Mapplethorpe's fame, and the wealth of the foundation he left behind, were built on his manipulation and betrayal of a man who loved and shaped him."

Updated through 10/23.

"At its core, the film is an exploration of the complications that arise amidst two different elements (whether between two seemingly unrelated works of art or between Wagstaff and Mapplethorpe themselves), and through a finely, sensually assembled montage of images, interviews, and generally unobtrusive narration, it is one evoked with a crystalline clarity," writes Rob Humanick at Slant.

"Everyone (Patti Smith, Dominick Dunne, assorted gallerists and curators) recollects Wagstaff's extraordinary beauty, charm, intelligence, and prescient views on art," notes Nathan Lee in the Voice. "He was an early, influential advocate of Tony Smith, Agnes Martin and Ray Johnson, and one of the first to appreciate the terrible beauty of medical photography."

Jesse Ashlock talks with Crump for the Tribeca Film Festival.

Updates, 10/19: "The reputations of its subjects are almost certain to benefit from the film's portrayal of them as visionary aesthetes and collaborative geniuses at career management and the promotion of photography as a fine art with a high price tag," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "In the movie's many pictures of them, they exude the glamorous mystique of insolent movie and rock stars: think of James Dean and Jim Morrison but with a kinky gay twist. Talent, beauty, sex, death and finally pots of money; their story is a perfect storm around which to spin a profitable legend."

At the AV Club, Noel Murray suggests viewing the doc "as a companion piece to recent art-history docs like Peter Rosen's Who Gets To Call It Art? and Andy Warhol. On its own, Black White + Gray is fine, but a little dry."

Ben Gold talks with Crump for the Reeler.

Update, 10/23: The Guardian runs an adapted essay from Sylvia Wolf's Mapplethorpe: Polaroids, a "remarkable treasure trove of more than 1,500 photographs, the majority of them never published [that] reveal how instant photography provided Mapplethorpe with a mode of entry into his creative ambition, his sexual desires and the art world at large."

Posted by dwhudson at October 18, 2007 9:06 AM