When Peter Hujar Met Paul Thek

A new joint biography traces the lives and work of the two artists, who became lovers in the 1960s.

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........

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