Queer Artists Peter Hujar and Paul Thek Drew From Their Intimate Relationship to Create Unique 20th-Century Works

Their fascinating, intense pieces are being highlighted in new exhibitions this year—and their story is chronicled in a recent book

Elyssa Goodman | Freelance Writer

June 29, 2026 12:52 p.m.

Share

Copy linkEmailSMSFacebookXRedditLinkedInBlueskyPrint

Add as preferred source

By now, some of Peter Hujar’s black-and-white images have become indelible in the art world: Susan Sontag lounging on a bedspread in a ribbed sweater in 1975, Candy Darling surrounded by roses in a hospital in 1973, David Wojnarowicz holding a cigarette up to his mouth in 1981.

New York City’s Morgan Library & Museum acquired Hujar’s archives in 2013. The artist died in 1987 at age 53, leaving his estate to the author Stephen Koch, who died this February. The Morgan’s new exhibition, “Hujar:Contact,” open through October 25, displays more than 110 of Hujar’s contact sheets and 20 enlargements. The Morgan’s collection includes more than 5,700 of Hujar’s contact sheets.

Joel Smith, the Morgan’s curator and department head of photography, says the images maintain their stature because of their aesthetic, technical value and relatability—the intimate way Hujar captured the lives of his friends makes those relationships seem tangible to the viewer. Analog, black-and-white photos were ubiquitous in the artist’s time, Smith notes, but Hujar still managed to forge a unique visual signature and create images so powerful that they’re still potent decades later.

Hujar was influenced by living and working in New York City. He was also shaped, in part, by his 20-year relationship with the artist Paul Thek. The pair are the subjects of the recent book The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, by Andrew Durbin, writer and Frieze magazine editor in chief.

Both artists are represented in the Smithsonian collections. Hujar’s images of Sontag and poet John Ashbery reside at the National Portrait Gallery. A couple of Thek’s mixed-media pieces, Untitled (Meat Pyramid) and Moonrise, are with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and his sculpture Warrior’s Leg is at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. But their legacies in the arts occupy different spaces.

When he was working, “people knew who Peter Hujar was,” says Durbin. “They’d seen some of the images, mostly because he had photographed some famous people. That kept his name in the more general audience mix. … And then it just slowly evolved.”

It later helped, too, that Koch worked hard to push Hujar’s pictures. Eventually, the collection found its audience, Durbin says.

But Thek’s work was largely installation-based, and he didn’t make posterity a priority, according to Durbin. Rather, he says, Thek’s things were left “in a state of disarray,” upon his death at 54 in 1988.

His pieces are perhaps best known in Europe, where Thek’s admirers were “very intensely devoted to him,” notes Durbin.

As Durbin writes in The Wonderful World That Almost Was, “From the late 1960s to the early ’70s, he moved away from creating ‘rarefied artifacts’ to large-scale, temporary installations in some of the leading museums in Europe, which were celebrated by some critics and curators, but left his galleries with little to sell.”

“There was always this churning interest in Paul Thek in Europe, not so much for the United States,” says Durbin. In the U.S., Thek was considered an embodiment of a new type of rebellion. “Paul was very splashy in the 1960s,” he says.

He had drawn attention for sculptures composed of “Plexiglas boxes filled with naturalistic beeswax replicas of hunks of meat and body parts,” according to the Whitney Museum of American Art. “Everyone looked at these meat pieces and was completely aghast, but he didn’t create acolytes. …There was no way to sell that work, and therefore it was of no interest to the art world,” Durbin says. He notes that the first big, posthumous Thek exhibition in the U.S., “Paul Thek: Diver, a Retrospective,” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, didn’t take place until 2010.

“There hasn’t been an institutional exhibition of that scale, or even close to that scale since then” in the U.S., Durbin says, but “here in Europe, there’s a touch of Paul Thek everywhere. Every young artist cites Paul Thek.”

Like Hujar’s, Thek’s art is featured in a new exhibition this year: “Dream of Vanishing,” through August 14 at New York’s Pace Gallery. Pace calls Thek “one of the most mysterious, provocative and quietly influential figures in the history of post-1960s art.”

Beyond their impacts on the American art world, Thek and Hujar had a profound effect on each other. Though they were at first lovers, they later became friends, and as Durbin says, “they always took all of their great artistic leaps forward either together or in orbit of one another.” This includes, for example, a 1963 visit to the Capuchin Catacombs, in Palermo, Italy, home to a large collection of preserved skeletons and mummified bodies. The experience influenced their thinking, specifically, as Durbin says, “the ways that art addresses life and death, the two big topics that that are coursing through all of their work.”

Hujar took pictures of the bodies, which later became part of 1976’s Portraits in Life and Death, the only book he would publish in his lifetime. Thek created a sculpture called La corazza di Michelangelo, as Durbin notes in The Wonderful World That Almost Was, meant to evoke the chest of a dead and decomposing Roman soldier.

The pair also made portraits of each other, Thek in paint and Hujar in photographs. Thek’s “Television Analyzations” series was inspired by witnessing Hujar in the darkroom, Durbin writes.

Today, Hujar and Thek are part of the pantheon of influential queer American artists, but both had a complicated relationship to such an idea. They wanted to be known for their creations. Hujar “didn’t want to have an asterisk next to his name as anything except an artist,” says Smith, the Morgan Library & Museum curator. “He obviously made no bones about the fact of his homosexuality, but he understood that in the values of the time, those qualifiers could only diminish people’s appreciation for what he was doing as an artist.”

The pair knew, according to Durbin, that in their era, being an openly gay artist was a challenge: “It meant you might not have a job, or worse, you might not be taken seriously.”

Durbin and Smith note that the artists’ oeuvres are especially significant to young people. “I think there’s an authenticity to it that people are craving so much right now,” Durbin says. Because although the earlier part of Hujar’s career was largely commercial—he counted fashion magazines among his clients—he ultimately pivoted to work he found stimulating, the people and places he encountered in his own life. Thek also followed his own path, creating in a variety of media, from sculpture to paint.

“It’s very hard for people now in their 20s and into their 30s to see a future in which they’ve got confident financial footing,” Smith says. “I think it leads to thinking about some kinds of decisions … that Hujar and his generation made—that perhaps it’s best to side with an uncertain future and let the chips fall where they may and not concern yourself with what seems to be a deck stacked against you.”

In Hujar’s and Thek’s work, the spirit of making art for art’s sake is alive and well. It’s what moved them more than anything else.

Elyssa Goodman | Read More

Elyssa Goodman is a New York-based writer and photographer and the author of Glitter and Concrete: A Cultural History of Drag in New York City.