Two thirds of the terrific triple header at the Morgan Library's free Friday nights left me feeling that this summer has been a lot like an extended Old Home Week at New York City's museums.
Contact sheets seem like an odd focus for an exhibit--even with magnifying glasses provided--until you realize they represent Peter Hujar's long-shot analog attempt at achieving posterity.
The 110 sheets on view represent less than two percent of those in the library's collection. Hujar found escape from a Dickensian childhood peering through a camera lens at the age of 13. Three years later he left home, eventually falling in with an arty crowd that included Paul Thek who was about to make a big splash in the art world, something that never happened for Hujar. Portraits in Life and Death, his shot at the big time, misfired in 1976 even though it, and Thek's most acclaimed works, shared the same macabre inspiration: Sicilian catacombs.
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| Paul Thek, Coral Gables, Florida (ca. 1956) |
It isn't hard to see why Andy Warhol shot "Screen Tests" of the young lovers, adding both to a reel he called "The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys," but the couple kept their distance from the Factory scene. Hujar, who had trained as a commercial photographer, took a master class from Richard Avedon, eventually developing a style that used shadow as evocatively as his teacher employed saturated light.
By 1967 Hujar decided he was done working for other people and established his own home studio on the Lower East Side. He primarily focused on portrait photography. Many members of the downtown queer community posed for him, including Jackie Curtis, then a Warhol "superstar" and later Ethyl Eichelberger, a performance artist who made a name for himself playing some of history's most famous women. Some say Curtis annotated Hujar's contact sheet herself, aspirationally.
Jackie Curtis (ca 1971)
This year's Biennial also memorialized Eichelberger. I was around for the beginning of these artists' careers, and untimely ends. So much loss among the creative New Yorkers of my generation and the one before me, not always HIV-related.
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| Ethyl Eichelberger as Lucretia Borgia (1982) |
Hujar and another of his boyfriends, Jim Fouratt witnessed the Stonewall rebellion together. Although Hujar didn't document catch the event on film, Fouratt, an organizer who later co-founded Danceteria, engaged him to shoot the first recruiting poster for the Gay Liberation Front. He's second from the right, and still alive.
Hujar often encouraged his subjects to turn his camera on him, believing it loosened them up for his own work. Unlike Avedon and Robert Mapplethorpe--whom he disdained for his emphasis on the superficial--he wanted to dig deeper and reveal what made people tick.
His portrait sessions often took place during conversations that could last hours. Filmmaker Ira Sachs made a movie about one of them called Peter Hujar's Day based on a book by a close friend he had photographed. Her tape recorder became the audio equivalent of his camera. Lucky for us and him, too. Nearly 40 years after his death in 1987, it introduced him to a generation more inclined to recognize his artistic integrity.
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| Linda Rosenkranz (mid-1960s) |
Candy Darling, another Warhol "superstar" (and no fool when it came to self-presentation), summoned him to her room at Cabrini Hospital, where she was being treated for lymphoma. He captured her deathbed glamor as if she were a real Hollywood icon posing for George Hurrell. Death isn't always an evergreen buzzkill.
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| Candy Darling, Cabrini Health Care Center (1973) |
As this as this exhibit amply demonstrates, the perfect photo could be elusive when cameras didn't come with delete buttons Yet the preservation of his contact sheets and negatives, which are held by the Peter Hujar Archive, comprehensively maps an artistic journey with all its detours, hits and misses. Ironically, as a result of his chosen medium, Hujar's reputation has now eclipsed Paul Thek's, so much of whose truly unique work was ephemeral.
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| John Waters (1975) |
A more insouciant photo of John Waters made it into Portraits in Life and Death.
In 1969, Elektra Records hired Hujar to shoot Iggy Pop who was about to release his debut recording with The Stooges. I would love to have been a fly on wall for that overexposed session which nevertheless captures the protopunk's feral appeal . . . and big basket.
Hujar found Marsha P. Johnson, a Stonewall participant, at the Christopher Street Pier on Easter Sunday in 1976. For the most part, he was much better at photographing people in his studio than outdoors. I could have been one of the less muscular guys on bikes, although the piers on the Upper West Side were my usual stomping grounds.
His soulful portraits of animals outdoors were another story, perhaps because he had lived on his Ukrainian grandparents' farm as a child.
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| "Butch & Buster" (1978) |
Pets often got the studio treatment.
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| Bouche Walker (Reggie's Dog) (II) (1978) |
In 1980, Hujar formed an intense bond with David Wojnarowicz, 20 years his junior, who became his sometime lover, collaborator and driver.
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| David Wojnarowicz #1 (1981) |
Together they explored the New York metropolitan area at the peak of its industrial decline, with dumps a favorite stopping point. Neither lived long enough to experience the city's regeneration, although it's likely the smoking ban and gentrification of their neighborhood would have appalled them.
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| Canal Street Pier, 1983 |
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| "Orgiastic Man" (1969) |
Tarot cards, hand-made, began as a trick-taking game for well-to-do Italians during the Renaissance. Woodblock printing brought tarot to the masses and spread it beyond Italy. Players could purchase DIY sheets like these, color them and apply more substantial backing before trying to trump their opponents.
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| "Rosenwald Tarot" by Unidentifed Artist (Florence, ca 1500) |
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| "Tarot de Marseille" by Unidentified Artist (Avignon, ca 1760) |
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| "Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot Deck" (ca 1921-31) |
That isn’t to say that there haven’t been many design variations since, some surrealist.
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| "Paracelsus: Mage of Knowledge-Lock" by André Breton (1941) |
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| Untitled by Leonora Carrington (1969) |
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| Inert Residue by Jorge Camacho (1998) |
Aleister Crowley, also known as the "wickedest man in the world" because he never hid either his drug use or bisexuality, created the "Thoth Tarot" (1938-43). Although I couldn't care less about the occult symbolism, Lady Frieda Harris's illustrations are compelling.
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| "The Magus" |
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| Knight of Wands |
Dorothy lannone brought her deck--by far my favorite--into the realm of everyday life and added an explicitly sexual element. Each of these colorful cards from her "(Ta)Rot Pack" (1968-69) definitely struck a chord.
Betye Saar, who died in July at the age of 99, called this mixed-media etching "House of Tarot." You'd never know from looking at it that her oeuvre is best known for critiquing anti-Black racism. Perhaps I'm being a bit sexist, but it seems to me from the number of women at the exhibit and the preponderance of female artists, tarot is more a girl thing.
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| (1966) |
Half a century after the fact, I'll admit that I bought Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, my first (and only) hardcover book of poetry, because I thought its author was sexy. In the jacket photo, John Ashbery had a clone mustache; this picture was taken ten years before the hot poet won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for his breakout work. Ashbery exuded serene confidence even then.
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| John Ashbery, Water Mill by John Jonas Gruen (1965) |
Turns out he had an early affinity for surrealistic collage which became a kind of model for his poetry. He made this one at Harvard. If I'd understood Self-Portrait wasn't supposed to make narrative sense, perhaps I would have tried harder to finish it. Ogden Nash was more my speed, although I did once commit the first stanza of "The Love Song of J. Arthur Prufock" to memory while walking Smokey in the mornings, figuring that if Mom could quote Shakespeare, her son should have a similar parlor trick.
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| Late for School (1948) |
Ashbery, also an esteemed art critic, ran with a pretty cool crowd. Several very talented friends made him gifts of their drawings.
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| "My Love, My Love" by Niki de Saint Phalle (1968) |
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| "Summer Still Life" (1978) |
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| Untitled by Francesco Clemente (2007) |
Philip Pearlstein was among those artists who sketched Ashbery.
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| 1972 |
Ashbery's husband, David Kermani, donated some 25 works on paper to the Morgan after the poet's death in 2017. Larry Rivers caught the couple, who lived together nearly 50 years in Chelsea and Hudson, New York, in graphite and colored pencil.
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| "David & John" (1977) |
As soon as I got back to 47 Pianos I took this photo of drawing given to me on my 40th birthday. Ted drew flowers growing in a rusty pan on the deck of the Muller Cottage. It still makes me very, very happy.
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| Drawing by Ted Dawson (1993) |
My visit to the Morgan also made me wish I hadn't donated my first edition of Self-Portrait (now semi-valuable) to my branch library. Given the title poem's early shoutout to Vasari--whose Renaissance man talents were my favorite discovery in northern Italy last fall--I might have tried it again. Maybe I'll listen to Ashbery reading his mastepiece aloud instead.
As Parmigianino did it, the right handBigger than the head, thrust at the viewerAnd swerving easily away, as though to protectWhat it advertises. A few leaded panes, old beams,Fur, pleated muslin, a coral ring run togetherIn a movement supporting the face, which swimsToward and away like the handExcept that it is in repose. It is what isSequestered. Vasari says, "Francesco one day set himselfTo take his own portrait, looking at himself for that purposeIn a convex mirror, such as is used by barbers . . .
Or maybe not. I just checked out what Thom Gunn, another hot poet a couple of years younger than Ashbery, said about about his more successful rival's work in his collected letters:
Since you brought up John Ashbery, and since I passed a vague judgment on him in my last letter, I thought I would take him up again. I quickly put him down. Totally incomprehensible. And you don’t even feel like wanting to know what he means. (January 1970)
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Just been reading Ashbery‘s latest book, April Galleons. Now I don’t suppose he ever has any difficulty in placing his poems in an order: even passages within poems could be changed around. But it is difficult to object to a poet who can write the line,“ Isn’t that your son‘s tibia in the pilaf?“ And the book does make me laugh a lot. (June 1989)
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I’m looking out my window now and seeing the leaves being blown on the wind like pages from the calendar in a 1940s Hollywood movie – gee, do you think I could write a John Ashbery poem after all? (November 1989)
Haters gotta hate! And if the two men were to be judged by the quality of their friends, Ashbery would win hands down again.
