Stephen Koch

Here’s a little more on the artistic bond between Peter Hujar and Richard Avedon. My own first hint of it came in 1978-late!-when with a small thrill I spotted the world-famous looping signature in the guest book of a Hujar show at Marcuse Pfeiffer. Well, well said I: look at that. None other than. (And Avedon bought a picture: Ornamental Ball, Italy, 1978, now in the collection of the Princeton University Art Museum, and on view until June 28 in Joel Smith’s exhibition, “What is a Thing?”)

It must have been around that time that Peter was at my place and mentioned, in a somewhat too-carefully toneless voice, “I was up at Dick’s for dinner the other night.”

I froze. Trouble was on the way. “Dick” meant Avedon, and Avedon was a mine field. One wrong step-and sayonara.

I took a deep breath, poured myself a half-glass more of wine, and ventured, very carefully, “Well, well. So how did that go?”

Peter was not interested in chatting about social nuances.

“Dick,” he replied, “has one of my pictures in his living room beside a Julia Margaret Cameron.”

I was impressed. And I was relieved. We’d gotten this far without an explosion. We were still eating dinner. The pesto was still on the plates, not flung against the wall. So I ventured one inch further.

“So how did seeing it make you…uh, feel?”

In those days, all I knew about the Hujar-Avedon bond was that years before, the two artists had been almost vampiristicly bound, as if each was draining the other of some desperately-needed essence. And then, once whatever was happening was over, the friendship subsided into a complex don’t-touch-me dance of mistrustful mutual admiration-mutual admiration that was tinged with more mutual disappointment than either could say.

So it was a mine field.

While I fingered the stem of my wine glass, Peter pondered my question-”how did seeing your work beside Avedon’s Julia Margaret Cameron make you feel?”-as if for the first time ever. I watched as he silently sifted through the pros and cons. Since there were a whole lot of cons, it took a while.

While he pondered, I sat still.

At last he reached his verdict. “Good,” he said. “It made me feel….pretty good.”

Then came a smile like a sunrise, and I poured myself a good solid slug of medium-priced Italian red relief.

In an earlier post, I claimed that Avedon owned more works by Hujar than by any other photographer. Wrong. He had more Penns and more Arbuses. There were seven Hujars. Still, seven is a lot.

All were beautifully exhibited at Pace/McGill in 2006 when the Avedon Foundation put them up for sale. (Here is the checklist. The Hujar commentary is by yours truly.)

The centerpiece of the collection, and what Peter saw beside the Julia Margaret Cameron that night, was his Portrait of T.C. (You too can make it out on Avedon’s wall here.) Avedon also owned one of the animal pictures, the droll livestock duet that Peter dubbed Butch and Buster. He also owned the eloquent Portrait of Edwin Denby of 1975, with all that’s being said by those closed eyes.

He also bought one of Peter’s most haunting pieces of erotica, Bruce de Sainte Croix (Seated), 1978, an image that is sometimes labeled (cautiously) Seated Male Nude, and sometimes (ridiculously) Joe L. I am not going to post it here. Sorry. This is not, I hasten to add, because I am censoring what many believe to be a great picture. But this image is too good, and I believe too important, to be tossed to the wolves of a gazillion pornographic sites on the Internet. Like T.C. the mute uncanny dignity of Bruce de Sainte Croix (Seated) belongs beside the Julia Margaret Camerons and Lisette Models and August Sanders of this world, and not in the cesspools where it would be dragged and dropped, for sure, if I posted it here.

Two other Hujars in Avedon’s collection open a special perspective. The Portrait of James Waring and his Portrait of Sydney Faulkner are both images of dying men who are looking straight into the face of what Henry James called “the real distinguished thing.” Waring (a now-forgotten choreographer) and Faulkner (an actor in the Charles Ludlam Company) both had terminal cancer when Peter did their pictures. Faulkner was only days, even hours, from the end.

What does all this tell us about Hujar? About Avedon? About anything?

(The next post will be about how the two men met, and what happened between them when The Sixties were at their height.)