The Untold Story Of Peter Hujar And Paul Thek's Intimate-And Complex-Bond

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Peter Hujar and Paul Thek's friendship, love, and artistic exchange get a close reading in a new dual biography

A new book by Andrew Durbin revisits one of the most charged relationships in postwar American art: the bond between American photographer Peter Hujar (1934–1987) and American artist Paul Thek (1933–1988). The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek traces how the two men moved through New York, Europe, and the margins of the downtown art scene, shaping one another's work even as their lives diverged.

Durbin's premise is simple, but the material is not. Hujar and Thek were lovers at one point, then enduring friends, then something harder to define. Their connection began in the late 1950s, though the exact moment they met remains unclear. One early trace appears in Hujar's 1956 photographs from Florida, where Thek appears during a trip that also included Joseph Raffael and a visit to Villa Vizcaya in Coral Gables. In those images, the relationship already feels visually alive: Hujar's camera lingers on Thek with unusual intimacy.

The book places special weight on the pair's 1963 visit to the Capuchin Catacombs in Palermo, a site that would leave a lasting mark on both artists. Hujar's illicit photographs from the catacombs later became central to his 1976 book Portraits of Life and Death, while Thek transformed the experience into The Tomb (1967) and his meat pieces. The catacombs, with their rows of preserved bodies, sharpened each artist's preoccupation with mortality, flesh, and the human form.

That shared sensibility did not prevent their careers from taking different paths. Hujar found steadier commercial work before becoming a fixture of the downtown New York art world with portraits that are intimate, unsparing, and often quietly devastating. Thek, by contrast, pursued more unwieldy forms, including wax flesh sculptures that were admired for their ambition and resisted easy sale. Their temperaments, like their practices, pulled in different directions.

Still, the two remained linked by correspondence, visits, and a recurring emotional tension that Durbin treats with care. They shared time on Fire Island in the 1960s and continued to photograph, write, and remember one another across distance. Hujar's archive is now at the Morgan Library, while Durbin's research on Thek drew on the Watermill Center and collections across Europe.

What emerges is not a tidy portrait of partnership, but a study in artistic entanglement. Durbin's book suggests that for Hujar and Thek, the personal and the aesthetic were never fully separable - and that the mystery between them may be as revealing as the record itself.

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