When Peter Hujar Met Paul Thek

Peter Hujar’s most famous photograph, Candy Darling on Her Deathbed, looks like an Old Hollywood melodrama transposed to a hospital room in 1970s New York. The Warhol superstar was in the final stages of lymphoma, a fact the image itself nearly disavows. Darling stretches languorously across a tousled bed, her face painted, a femme fatale entreating the camera. A bouquet of white chrysanthemums glares like flashbulbs behind her, while a single long-stemmed rose rests on the sheets, as if tossed from the rafters.

Hujar’s fascination with the interplay of life and death dated back at least a decade. In 1963, he’d traveled with his lover, the painter and sculptor Paul Thek, to the Capuchin Catacombs in Sicily, where mummified bodies were preserved and often posed in lifelike suspension. The crypt offered Hujar evocative portrait subjects and the opportunity to experiment with light, shadow, and the theatricality of the human figure. Candy Darling enacts these concerns, presenting a body on the threshold of mortality yet incandescent with calculated glamour. The image sanctified Darling in the queer imagination as eternally alluring, eternally 29.

For Thek, the visit to Capuchin was similarly formative. He was struck by the sense of mutability he encountered underground. “It delighted me that bodies could be used to decorate a room, like flowers,” he told the curator Gene Swenson. “We accept our thingness intellectually, but the emotional acceptance of it can be a joy.” Over the next several years, he found acclaim—mostly in Europe—for sculptures and installations that reinterpreted the evanescence of the body. His own most famous work, completed in 1967, was a life-size wax effigy modeled after himself entitled The Tomb.

“If they can be said to have shared a subject, it was almost certainly death,” Andrew Durbin writes of the artists in The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, a joint account of their entangled careers. Death is not only the leitmotif of their work but a tragic near simultaneity in their biographies. Both men died of AIDS-related illnesses less than a year apart: Hujar in 1987, at 53, and Thek in 1988, at 54. Their legacies have diverged sharply since. Despite a retrospective at the Whitney in 2010 and frequent inclusion in group shows, Thek remains somewhat subliminal in American art history, partly because of his years abroad and partly because many of his improvised, transient assemblages were lost or destroyed.

Hujar, meanwhile, is safely canonized, an instance of posthumous consecration that recalls that of Vivian Maier or Francesca Woodman. He’s a fixture of international galleries, and last year was unlikely fodder for a biopic starring Ben Whishaw, Peter Hujar’s Day, based on the transcript of a conversation he had with writer Linda Rosenkrantz in 1974. Portraits in Life and Death (1976), the only book he published in his lifetime, was reissued in 2024. More recently, Paul Thek and Peter Hujar: Stay Away From Nothing, a collection of his early photos accompanied by Thek’s letters, was released by the Brooklyn art publisher Primary Information. Another stand-alone biography is in the works.

Durbin, the editor in chief of Frieze, deliberately restricts the time span of his book to the roughly two decades before the rise of AIDS. He begins just before Hujar and Thek met in the 1950s and ends in 1975, when they had an inexplicable falling out and rarely spoke again. This was a time when their lives “were filled with light and color, exuberant personalities, extraordinary art; they were beloved, even if loving them was difficult at times.” Durbin writes of their deaths in an epilogue, but as the book’s title implies, Wonderful World resists the grim inevitability of AIDS narratives and tells a story that is sweeter, more domestic, and cliquish. Among the “exuberant personalities” that formed the artists’ inner circle were Susan Sontag, Fran Lebowitz, and the various luminaries who sat for Hujar’s camera. His work persists less as a document of 1970s New York—an era that remains a cultural infatuation—than as a record of how he and his milieu collaborated in their own self-mythologization.

“Things get more beautiful as they get more fragile,” Thek once wrote in his journals, a maxim that describes his art and, occasionally, life itself.

Neither had an idyllic childhood. Hujar was born in New Jersey in 1934, the son of an absentee father and a waitress mother who couldn’t raise the boy on her own. She sent him to her parents’ farm, where he frolicked among cows and geese and vegetable gardens. This pastoral upbringing informed his earliest photos—of cows in a field—and would echo in some of his later images of animals and landscapes. Thek was born in 1933 and grew up on Long Island, the second of four children. His father, George, was a prototypical “man in a gray suit” who commuted to work in the city, leaving his wife in the suburbs to booze and dash off sad poems. Durbin relates a vivid anecdote about George wearing a head device in the evenings to help “reactivate” nerves paralyzed by cancer. “The gadget would interrupt the television signals, prompting a fit in Paul’s mother, who might otherwise have fallen into an alcoholic stupor that Paul thought was a kind of trance.”

Both men were drawn to art early, and both approached their sexuality as something to explore rather than as a fixed fact. Hujar, who had his first gay encounter at 16, was markedly more precocious and self-assured in this regard. “By 1970, he guessed that he might have had sex with at least fifteen thousand people,” Durbin writes. Thek identified as bisexual and was more ambivalent: “No one was much convinced of Paul’s attraction to women, even when he started sleeping with them.” Still, by the 1950s they were in relationships with other men—Hujar with the painter Joseph Raffael, and Thek with the set designer Peter Harvey. In 1956, Raffael traveled to Florida to visit Thek, whom he knew from Cooper Union, where Thek lived in a small house in Coral Gables and flitted through odd jobs: taxi driver, gardener, bookstore clerk. Hujar went, too, camera in hand.

The photos he took during the trip “have a soft, almost neo-romantic tone,” Durbin writes, comparing them to the cloistered, coded tableaus that PaJaMa—Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret Hoening French—staged in the 1930s and ’40s along East Coast beaches. One portrait presents Thek barefoot and boyishly coy on a forest floor, while another captures him plaintively indoors. “Here are the many faces a pretty boy is supposed to make when trying to charm the camera,” Durbin notes. The session allows him to introduce an idea that will recur throughout the book—that Hujar’s radiographic eye could penetrate a sitter’s artifice and reveal something like a soul: “His camera reached into you, rummaged around for parts of you that you might not have realized were there, parts he then brought forward, into the open—the raw and undigested, the real.”

By 1960, Hujar and Thek had become lovers; the details of exactly how and when went unrecorded. They traveled together to Italy, where Hujar was on a Fulbright scholarship, studying film. In Europe, Thek immersed himself in the Old Masters and Van Gogh, absorbing something of the latter’s gestural urgency into his own paintings. Hujar continued taking photographs—of children playing on village streets, religious processions, ruins, the sea. Their European sojourn culminated in a visit to the Capuchin Catacombs in Palermo in 1963. According to their friend Ann Wilson, “The catacombs were, in their eyes, a sculptural installation [in which] the body is a visible relic referring to the Resurrection.” Soon after, Thek’s sculptures would begin resembling unidentifiable meat molded into biomorphic forms, while Hujar’s images formalized—almost eroticized—contrast and lighting.

Eroticism was another signature of Hujar’s and Thek’s work, perhaps even more pronounced than death—or, rather, inseparable from it. In the late 1960s, Hujar began documenting the “little death” of orgasm. (His 1969 photo Orgasmic Man, a close-up of his friend Dutch Anderson climaxing, was later ubiquitous as the cover of Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 bestseller, A Little Life.) For Thek, eroticism emerged obliquely, a by-product of his sculptures’ viscerality. He sometimes told an anecdote about stumbling upon a woman masturbating to his sculpture Meat Piece With Warhol Brillo Box when it was included in a group show at MoMA in 1966. That assemblage—a hunk of wax made to mimic raw, sinewy beef, a tube poked in its middle, planted inside one of Andy Warhol’s infamous Brillo boxes—carries a sexual je ne sais quoi, although it wouldn’t titillate any but the most fetishistic of butchers. As Thek recalled, “She leaned forward and touched her lips to the tube extending from the Brillo box. He never forgot the slurping sound she made.”

Susan Sontag, Thek’s sometime lover, titled her 1964 essay “Against Interpretation” after one of Thek’s offhand remarks. She ends that piece by rallying for an “erotics of art,” an approach that privileges experience over analysis, in which erogenous and neural responses are preferable to intellectual dissection. In this sense, the bootlegged carnality of Meat Piece with Warhol Brillo Box or the candid immediacy of Orgasmic Man exemplifies Sontag’s principle: The work’s power resides in its capacity to be felt, not explained.

Hujar’s images also depend, however, on a controlled performance. In his photos, sitters are attuned to the camera and finesse their presentation accordingly. Contrary to the notion of Hujar as a clairvoyant who could excavate a subject’s essence, he was a studio photographer by inclination—a kindred spirit to Richard Avedon, with whom he studied in 1967 as part of a master class. Just as Avedon’s white backdrop became a psychic vista, so Hujar’s apartment functioned as a domestic theater for people’s rehearsals. In his portraits, electrical outlets, baseboards, scuffed floors, and stark walls add accents of drab realism that only underscore the illusion of unmediated truth playing out in front of the camera. All of Hujar’s subjects are in drag; some of them literally, as in his portraits of Ethyl Eichelberger, and others in the practiced faces they assumed when posing for posterity.

Durbin compares Hujar to Diane Arbus, a guest lecturer in Avedon’s master class: “If Arbus’s most recognizable portraits capture the unsettled and even deranged outskirts of American life … often in nagging isolation, then Peter would strive for a more understanding portraiture.” Arbus tends to treat her subjects as specimens, while Hujar sees his as models, perhaps a holdover from his much-resented gigs as a fashion photographer for Harper’s Bazaar and other magazines. A model’s job is to sell a fantasy, and in Hujar’s images, sitters compose oblivion-proof versions of themselves. (Sontag used a photo that Hujar took of her in 1966 as the author image for Against Interpretation.) In a 1975 follow-up portrait, Sontag reclines on a blanket in front of a bare wall, hands behind her head, seemingly entranced by clouds on the ceiling—an icon of leisurely erudition that could just as well be a billboard or an ad for public radio. It was a posture Hujar recycled; John Waters, William S. Burroughs, Ray Johnson, Divine, and others recline in their portraits, intimating a vulnerability that’s easy to mistake as sincere. Hujar perfected the mannerism in his 1985 photo of Warhol superstar Jackie Curtis lying in her open casket; here, vulnerability and sincerity have no choice but to coalesce.

His rapport with animals is another refrain in Wonderful World. “Peter communicated so fluently with animals as to seem to possess an almost magical linguistic power, like that of Saint Francis,” Durbin writes, adding later that “with animals, Peter waded into mystery.” To my eyes, the drama of Hujar’s animal portraits is overstated, though there are exceptions. In his 1985 photo of Will, a shar-pei with a deeply corrugated coat, the dog looks wistfully off camera, as if satisfied that he’s finally being taken seriously. Another image shows a cow emerging from darkness, flash-lit, nothing else discernible except the silhouette of a skeletal building and foothills in the distance. The photograph startles; you don’t know who is confronting whom—both you and the animal are fellow wanderers in the field of night.

Thek’s work startles, too, in a more graphic manner. The Tomb (also known as Death of a Hippie, much to Thek’s chagrin) took six weeks to make and became the epitaph for a strain of ’60s idealism that, even then, had turned gangrenous. At the center of the piece is a wax replica of Thek’s own body, tinged pink, displayed on its back like an embalmed corpse. Its blackened tongue protrudes. In early versions of the installation, the figure was placed inside a ziggurat, also painted pink, that mimicked a shrine or a crime scene. “This was still the so-called Summer of Love, yet [Thek] had seen through the hippie hype, the dope clouds, the be-ins, to the madness lying beneath the surface of everything: The gnawing disappointment, the deepening despair,” Durbin writes, an analysis that would have irked Thek, who denied the piece’s sociological subtext. His meat pieces, which he called Technological Reliquaries, were further dispatches from a berserk American id, sounding “a note of horror from the psychological depths of the country itself,” per Durbin.

Thek first exhibited the meat pieces at the Stable Gallery in New York in 1964. The show was, briefly, a curiosity, and made Thek an artist to watch. Still, almost none of the pieces sold—then or ever. The work unnerved museums and collectors, who likely didn’t appreciate Thek’s mischievousness. As he explained the pieces to a journalist, “I see it as a form of barbaric humor—a violation of humanism.” He elaborated in a conversation with Artforum in 1981, connecting the Reliquaries to an effete estrangement from real-world concerns:

I was amused with the idea of meat under Plexiglas because I thought it made fun of the scene—where the name of the game seemed to be “how cool can you be” and “how refined.” Nobody ever mentioned anything that seemed real. The world was falling apart, anyone could see it. I was a wreck, the block was a wreck, the city was a wreck; and I’d go to a gallery and there would be a lot of fancy people looking at a lot of stuff that didn’t say anything about anything to anyone.

After the Stable Gallery show, Thek returned to Europe, where he had bit parts in a few spaghetti Westerns and embarked on a loose body of work called Processions. These temporary, ritual-like actions and sculptural arrangements were ephemeral by design. Thek, who already had a mystical bent, had begun speaking about art as a spiritual and collective experience rather than a permanent object in a gallery. By using perishable materials—paper, fabric, flowers, cheap paint, candles, food—he made works that couldn’t easily be bought, preserved, or owned. In one work from 1969, for example, he toted a wooden cross on his back through the countryside and hung it in a tree. Many of these pieces no longer survive except in photographs.

At the same time, he began exhibiting symptoms of the undiagnosed mental disorder that shadowed the final stretch of his life—“a severe case of going down in flames,” he called it. His friends suspected bipolar disorder, or even untreated syphilis. “By [Thek’s] own count, he had gone mad two or three times, and he looked to Christianity for answers,” Durbin writes, noting that the artist considered joining a monastery in Vermont. By the mid-’70s, he and Hujar had drifted apart; the latter’s career had remained steady back in New York. Hujar’s commercial work had appeared in major fashion magazines, on album covers (the Fugs, Iggy and the Stooges), and in advertisements for companies such as IBM. He shot celebrities and scene-makers, and a number of nudes, including a well-known triptych of Bruce de Ste. Croix manhandling his oversize erection. “Why can’t you have someone ... touching himself and still have the same artistic considerations?” Hujar mused. If his photographs feel genuine, it’s because they accept performance as the condition of authenticity, not its opposite.

Hujar’s photos enshrine a volatile moment in which New York found itself at a crossroads. The city was derelict and falling apart, but subversive ways of living and art-making flourished in the cracks. His visual grammar—black-and-white portraits with sparse backgrounds and sitters who meet the camera with a mix of susceptibility and resolve—condenses the era into a mood, an aesthetic that feels like shorthand for truth itself. His style remains a template for how serious celebrities and thinkers want to be seen: austere, self-possessed, authentic, as if depth registers on the mask of the face. Thek, by contrast, resisted any stable image, insisting on fragility and spiritual unease. Yet together they mark a shared refusal of commodification. Hujar dignified the individual body through restraint; Thek dissolved the art object through ritual and decay. Both proposed that meaning emerges from exposure—emotional, physical, and moral.

In the summer of 1975, Hujar photographed Thek for the final time. One of the images from that session appears in Portraits in Life and Death. Compared to his earlier images of Thek, this one seems off-the-cuff, as if captured between setups. Thek looks at the camera open-mouthed, his expression flat, light gently halving his face. It’s a portrait neither flattering nor ugly, but ambiguous—much like the artists’ relationship at that point. “It was hard for anyone to put their finger on where things began to go wrong between them,” Durbin writes. “Probably, it was a gradual accumulation of moments, of slights and snide remarks, most of them hidden from the record.” Their split would be permanent, although Thek didn’t realize it then. “Any time you want to make love, just ask me,” he told Hujar. There’s no evidence Hujar ever accepted the offer.

In one of those coincidences that almost make you believe in cosmic irony, Hujar died in room 1423 at Cabrini Health Care Center—the same room where he’d photographed Candy Darling on her deathbed more than a decade earlier. His friend and former lover, the artist David Wojnarowicz, photographed Hujar’s body in the immediate aftermath. These close-ups of hands and feet and Hujar’s face—mouth ajar, eyes cracked—recall images that Hujar himself would have taken. Less than nine months later, Thek was dead, too, another casualty in that cavalcade of loss that brought to an end a certain era of queer self-invention. “Nothing lasts forever, other than paradise,” he’d once written. He might have put it more honestly: Paradise is what’s left after you’ve tried everything else.