Stephen Koch

When he met Richard Avedon in 1967, Peter Hujar was already well launched as the Great Unknown of American Photography. He was 33 and a mature artist, quite obviously poised to be some kind of Somebody in the coming generation, There was a substantial amount of museum-quality work in his portfolio: for example, he’d done the now-famous Palermo Catacomb Series four years before, and his plangent images of retarded and impaired children—which I suspect influenced both Avedon and Arbus—were older than that.

At that moment, Avedon was in a transition from youthful éclat to eminence. He’d left the cradle of his career, Harper’s Bazaar, the year before, and so had Harper’s former art director, Marvin Israel, who also served as Avedon’s artistic right hand. Both men were looking for some connection to the next generation, and to that end, they set up what became a watershed event in photography of the time. The Master Class. Not a master class. The Master Class—a weekly meeting in the Avedon studio on the Upper East Side, in which Avedon and Israel gathered under their wing the young photographers they believed were going to dominate the next generation in New York.

Avedon may have been remembering his own career. Back when he himself wasn’t yet quite Somebody, he’d taken just such a master class given by Marvin Israel’s predecessor at Harper’s Bazaar, Alexey Brodovitch. The class had been a revelation—and his entrée to the magazine.

Given the teachers, students, and guest speakers attending, the talent-quotient in the Master Class was somewhere near stratospheric. The students included Deborah Turbeville, Hiro, Chris von Wagenheim and Hujar. Diane Arbus visited repeatedly: Hujar’s friendship with Arbus dates from this moment, and all through the later sixties they could often be seen together, endlessly wandering through the Village, cameras slung around their necks, talking and snapping. Another visitor was Lucas Samaras, who in 1967 was a crossover figure between sixties surrealism and photography. At first glance, Samaras may look less important to Hujar than Arbus, but I wonder. In those days, Samaras was showing his neo-surrealism at the just-born Pace gallery, as was Hujar’s then partner, Paul Thek, to whom Samaras had clear similarities. At the same time, Samaras was also moving toward photographic self-portraiture, and showed the Master Class his personal collection of 19^th Century French pornography.

Sixties surrealism; self-portraiture; erotica: a mix made for Hujar. He remained friends with Samaras for the rest of his life.

Finally, there was Marvin Israel, one of the key figures in modern photography; a mentor and tastemaker who in his way may have been more important even than Brodovitch. Israel was, first of all, indispensable to Avedon’s career both in fashion and his gallery work.  Beyond that, he mentored and guided the entire artistic trajectory of Diane Arbus, both before and after her death.  He designed the most important book by Lisette Model. He influenced on the generation that followed Avedon and Arbus, such as Deborah Turbeville.

As for Peter, I can think of nobody (apart from Lisette Model herself) whom he esteemed more highly than Israel. He saw Marvin as a sage; when Peter was dying often grieved that nobody, nobody but Marvin, (who’d expired a year before) could ever really understand his work.

Finally, it may be that the most important thing about the Master Class was its moment. Not so much what took place, but when.  For most readers of this post, the interval between (let’s say), early 1966 and early June 1968, the week during which  Warhol was shot on one day and Bobby Kennedy assassinated on the next, may feel like pre-history. Or that very well-worn cliché: the (yawn) sixties.

Yet for many of us, for the people in my generation and Peter’s, that moment really was the annus mirabilis, a  catalytic time when everything seemed to rush together and fuse and leave life transformed. It felt that way to me. I think it felt that way to Peter. Maybe it felt that way to the whole culture. Certainly when that murderous first week of June 1968 hit us,  even though we were still the same country we’d been in 1965, and still the same people, somehow everything was drastically different.

I think Hujar’s prime sixties moment may have been The Master Class. However much or little he learned in it, he came out transformed. More completely himself. More mature. Less alone. More with it. More fully empowered for his life, his time.

Avedon, Israel and that year of wonders, 1967, had provided him with all that. Not bad.  Not bad at all.

At some point Peter told the Master Class that for his project he would do a series of nude self-portraits, images of himself naked and running.

With a stick of dynamite up his rear.

Avedon was delighted. Marvin Israel was horrified. He “groaned and moaned.” But the series got made, and here are two images from it, which present a portrait of the artist as a thirty-three-year-old, in his sixties moment.

Without the dynamite.

Last Friday afternoon, the writer C. Carr interviewed me for her forthcoming biography of the late David Wojanrowicz, the phenomenal young painter and writer, who died of AIDS in 1992 at the age of 38, and who was the surrogate son of Peter Hujar.  We had a lot to talk about. David and Peter’s lives and deaths were momentously intertwined.

David Wojanrowicz was the decisive artistic relationship at the end of Peter Hujar’s career. Peter was (I think) the decisive artistic relationship in the beginning of David’s. Their story is one of the most fascinating in the annals of the downtown eighties scene in New York, and when I heard the news that Cindy Carr had signed with Bloomsbury to write David’s biography I felt a shiver of excitement, sensing that this story had maybe found its storyteller.

And when I told Cindy I’d been waiting for her call, she seemed mildly surprised, and that surprised me a little. This encounter had to happen.

“So how much time do you think you’ll need?” I asked.

Cindy is really terribly polite, not in the least intrusive, and so she murmured something about maybe an hour. One hour? “I think,” I said, “we’d better plan on two. At least.”

In fact, we barely got started in just under three.

Peter and David met in a bar: a plain old pick-up sometime in the winter of 1980-1981. David was twenty-six, a driven but directionless kid battered by dazzling but anarchic gifts that he was not yet even close to knowing how to handle.  And like Peter, David’s physical presence was a little intimidating: you could feel the heat of his youthful anger feeding and his youthful need feeding each other’s fire.

Peter was by then pushing fifty, the strong silent eminence of Deep Downtown.  He was a somebody who knew Everybody, and yet he was chronically alone, an artist who who’d produced several decades worth of masterful artistic achievement known to Everybody from Arbus to Warhol to Mapplethorpe—but to nobody else.  He could make art.  He could not manage a career.  From the outside, he looked commanding.  Inside, he struggled with depression, and woke up many mornings thinking he was maybe getting to the end of his rope.

The older artist with his achievement and the younger artist with his possibilities transformed each other’s destinies, and their story is a tremendous biographical read.  I am not going to steal any of Cindy Carr’s thunder here, but I do want to note the broad outline of how I see their friendship, and while I’m at it, clear up a myth.

The myth is that David and Peter were partners.  Wrong.  True enough, step one was a pick-up in a bar, and David and Peter certainly did have a sexual fling.  It lasted maybe two months.  Maybe less.  David’s actual partner, then and to the end of his life, was an admirable and very together guy named Tom Rauffenbart, who is now David’s executor and heir. I know of no evidence that David ever once considered leaving Tom for Peter, and David soon let Peter know (probably to Peter’s regret) that he did not want their obviously life-changing relationship to remain sexual.

After that, the really powerful phase of the friendship began: mutual artistic transformation.  Peter looked at David and saw life-redeeming young talent.  David looked at Peter and saw life-directing achievement. Peter’s achievement gave David’s talent direction and definition.  David’s promise gave Peter’s achievement rejuvenation and vindication.  David needed someone who cared passionately about what he might do.

Peter needed someone who cared just as passionately about what he had done. David needed direction–shaping, seriousness, discipline.  Maturity, in a word. A father.  Peter needed someone whose boundless energy and boisterous talent gave him new life, and in whose success he could rejoice without a second thought.  In short, he needed a son.

What you see here is a taste of what went between them visually.