A Spiritual Quest Derailed by the Mortal Weight of the Material World

‘The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek’By Andrew DurbinFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 496 pagesPeter Hujar photographed places and people—most famously the Palermo catacombs and Susan Sontag. Paul Thek broke out of the traditional framing of painting and sculpture, knocking the world of art off its pedestal to create installations such as “Procession.”Hujar and Thek fell in love in the 1950s and began to break up in the 1960s, keeping up a fitful relationship that Andrew Durbin recounts in exquisite and sometimes excruciating detail. Hujar had a kind of self-possession that drove the unstable Thek mad. Hujar and Thek trekked from New York and its environs to Rome and other Italian sites to live as freely and austerely as possible while deriving inspiration for their iconoclastic work.Mr. Durbin provides wonderful examples of how much of Hujar’s art happened in the dark room. His portrait of Sontag, for example, has her lying on a mattress with her hands behind her head, but it is what happens afterwards that matters: “Peter brightened the background wall of his loft into a kind of sky while rendering the undulations of the blanket more pronounced. The image is almost a seascape, with Susan drifting on his bed like some grand ship.” Exactly. Hujar captures her in the process of becoming an icon.Thek, a religious artist, explained to the resolute secularist Hujar, that he wanted to create “a crazy show, a procession,” and “do all the things that people carry and wear in a procession, like jewelry, and masks and shrines etc., and it could be a joy to do.” This would be a sort of “‘peasant art,’ a sculpture closer to the people, which they could play with and wear in the gallery rather than admire at a distance, unlike anything he had done before — an exhibition that would shatter the Plexiglas separating him from his audience.”The tormented Thek, who often accused Hujar and other friends of betraying him, is treated in this biography as a mental case. But I am haunted by Thek’s religious quest that I think, based on my reading of Mr. Durbin’s evidence, helps to explain him not in psychological but in metaphysical terms. He did not know who to turn to other than to seek refuge, at crucial moments, in a monastery. Did any of his friends try to understand that impulse in an artist who otherwise seemed one of them? Mr. Durbin does not say. Perhaps he does not know.The materiality of this world entranced Hujar who wanted its physicality, including the act of making love, photographed — not so much documented as portrayed in a cinematic style reflecting his early, unfulfilled desire to be a movie director. At first, Thek may have seemed a kindred spirit, creating sculptures out of wax that mimicked the meatiness of human bodies.This beautiful biography features the beautiful bodies of these two genius-level artists, who cruised pickup spots for random lovers while at the same time enjoying the company of women and men who shared their ideas about art — notably, again, Sontag, whom Thek kept saying he wanted to marry in spite of her putting him off. She dedicated a collection of essays to Thek in tribute to his belief in the autonomy of art which set him “against interpretation,” the critic’s effort, in his view, to transform the esthetic into the ethical or didactic.Even a reader who knows nothing about Hujar and Thek but is even vaguely aware of the so-called “gay plague” of 1980s, will not be surprised at the deaths of these two men who hardly made it to middle age, who kept working as long as they could even while facing the mortal consequences of the material world that Hujar immersed himself in and that Thek tried to circumvent even as he remained a party to it.Mr. Durbin is fortunate in having not only much archival material to rely on but also interviews with the principals in the lives of these two men. His biography would be the poorer without the contributions of Fran Leibovitz, Ann Wilson, Stephen Koch, John Waters and many others who endow the narrative with an extraordinary depth and texture.Mr. Rollyson co-authored with Lisa Paddock ‘Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon.‘

A Spiritual Quest Derailed by the Mortal Weight of the Material World

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