THE WONDERFUL WORLD THAT ALMOST WAS

A vigorous life of two “consummate artist’s artists” now too-little known.

Painter and sculptor Paul Thek and photographer Peter Hujar have fallen into undue obscurity, “excluded from the history of art,” writes novelist Durbin (MacArthur Park, 2017, and Skyland, 2020). The reason, he ventures, is that both died in the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and, in doing so, ran afoul of what he and other commentators hold is the innately conservative nature of the art world. Their sometime friend and sometime antagonist Susan Sontag was once asked “how Paul might be remembered in the history of art,” and Sontag replied, “a footnote.” By Durbin’s account, this likely would have suited Thek just fine: He sold very little in his lifetime and seemed content to live a life bridging the beat and hippie eras. With Hujar, his sometime lover and sometime—well, antagonist—Thek also bridged the worlds of the closeted gay man of the 1950s and the politicized, decidedly out gay man of the Stonewall/Gay Liberation Front New York of the late 1960s and early ’70s. Durbin’s biography points to some of the psychological challenges involved; another friend, Fran Lebowitz, recalls that Hujar identified more closely with animals over people because both he and they “knew intimately what it was to experience human cruelty and unfairness.” In a work that brings in solid pop-culture history (think Warhol, Divine, and a self-admiring Jayne Mansfield), Durbin also capably charts Thek and Hujar’s contributions to Sontag’s thinking on issues of camp and of photography, on both of which she would write extensively while perhaps not giving credit where credit was due: “Because they observed and said things, intuitive, sensuous things she might have missed herself, she borrowed from their ideas and put them into her own words.”

Durbin’s excellent biography brings renewed attention to two creators whose works deserve a closer look.