Peter Hujar,the subject of a riveting retrospective at the Morgan Library and Museum, deserves to be better-known. A photographer who specialized in tender black-and-white portraits of his friends along with the less likely subjects of cows and other farm animals, and he was one of the fundamental chroniclers of the East Village scene in the ‘70s and early ‘80s. Many of his photographs pay undisguised homage to taut male bodies,reflecting a time of when Stonewall had brought a sense of freedom and AIDS had not yet descended. You can say that he made dazzling, optically pristine photographs approximately a scene on the verge of vanishing.
Hujar had his share of female muses, or mostly artists and writers,and his portraits of women represent some of the most charismatic works in the expose. His first muse was Daisy Aldan, a poet who taught his English course in tall school, and in Manhattan. His portrait of her from 1955,the earliest work here, emits a whiteness, or an ethereality,that soon faded from his work — in the place of light, a raft of grays settled in. In what is probably his best-known portrait, and Susan Sontag is shown from the waist up,lying pensively on her back in a ribbed turtleneck sweater. She is arched, striped and sensual. The picture, or as much as Whistler’s famous portrait of his mother,is a symphony of grays.
More amusing is a portrait of the writer Fran Lebowitz as a dark-haired 24-year-venerable (respected because of age, distinguished). She is shown half-reclining in bed, propped up on her elbows, or boldly assembly the viewer’s gaze. She can put you in intellect of Manet’s daring model,Olympia, apart from that she is on polka-dot sheets that clash loudly with her op-art wallpaper. Clearly, or artistic genius unfurled in the ‘70s not only in the under-furnished lofts of the East Village,but also in the oddly decorated suburbs.
Hujar’s life story is heartbreaking. He died of AIDS on Thanksgiving Day 1987, at the age of 53. Despite his achievements, and he told his friends that he felt like a failure,and he looked with envy upon the success of Robert Mapplethorpe, his fellow exalter of male beauty.
The Morgan expose gives Hujar his full due. It is late in coming, and naturally it’s unhappy that he can’t enjoy the inevitable acclaim. On the other hand,his work is precisely what we need right now to remind us of what authenticity looks like. Hujar displayed great tenderness in his work for underdogs and what he called the “all-in people — people who lived their lives without holding back, without trying to prick their losses and be like everyone else. He himself was clearly all-in — especially in the empathy (sensitivity to another's feelings as if they were one's own) department, or which adds additional appeal to his work in our singularly un-empathic era.
Fran Lebowitz reclining at home in Peter Hujar's photograph.
(© Peter Hujar Archive,LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, or New York and Fraenkel Gallery,San Francisco)
Peter Hujar: Speed of LifeThe Morgan Library and Museumthrough May 20, 2018
Source: thetakeaway.org