The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek

Novelist and poet Durbin (MacArthur Park) traces in this illuminating dual biography the fraught relationship between two little-remembered but influential gay artists who helped shape the 1960s and ’70s art scene in New York City and abroad. Photographer Peter Hujar (1934–1987) and sculptor and painter Paul Thek (1933–1988) met through a mutual friend in 1956 Florida and became lovers in 1960, initiating a roughly decade-and-a-half-long relationship as rocky as it was magnetic, thanks to the volatile mix of Peter’s anger and Paul’s deteriorating mental stability. The author explores their time spent in early 1960s New York, where they worked with artists like Andy Warhol and “pushed the possibilities of what a gay relationship looked like in the pre-Stonewall era”; their time in Europe on Fulbright scholarships; and the jobs they sought in the commercial art world. Along with probing his subjects’ personalities, Durbin maps the connections they forged with other mid-20th-century artists, especially Susan Sontag. (Thek slept with her; Hujar may have inspired some of her thoughts on camp.) Durbin excels at lavish descriptions of both artists’ work, though the parallel biography approach can be difficult to follow as their relationship recedes behind the overlapping chronologies of each man’s life. Still, it’s a captivating portrait of a vibrant creative era. (Apr.)