Samuel Jones Wagstaff Jr. (November 4, 1921 – January 14, 1987) was an American art curator and collector as well as the artistic mentor and benefactor of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (who was also his lifetime companion) and poet-punk rocker Patti Smith. Wagstaff is known in part for his support of minimalism, pop art, conceptual art and earthworks, but his aesthetic acceptance and support of photography presaged the acceptance of the medium as a fine art. Early life Samuel Wagstaff was born on November 4, 1921, in New York City. Wagstaff, a grandson of New York State Senator Alfred Wagstaff Jr., was the son of Samuel J. Wagstaff Sr., a wealthy lawyer from an old Social Register family, and his second wife, Olga May, born May Emilia Piorkowska (or Piorkowski) in New York in 1894, 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). His parents divorced in 1932, and Wagstaff's mother, a daughter of German inventor and scientist Col. Arthur Emil Piorkowski, married Donald V. Newhall, an artist. 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, and 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