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.

Peter Hujar is turning into history. The man I knew has become his art, and the art is spinning off a set of myths, some based in fact, some not.

Meanwhile, I gape at this statistic: If he’d lived, Peter would now be seventy-five. What hits me hardest about the throngs coming through his exhibitions is their youth. Not one fan in fifty is Peter’s own generation. Most were children when he died; there are six-footers assessing Candy Darling on her Deathbed (pictured below), who in 1987 hadn’t even been born. For them, Peter Hujar is his art.

But more and more they want to know his story.  Here’s a start.

Peter was rooted in the now-vanishing mean Manhattan streets of his beloved Weegee. His father was a small-time bootlegger; his stepfather was a small-time bookie; his mother was a waitress in a small-time diner. It was all very Damon Runyon stuff, and it stayed with him to the end.

Even the story behind his loft on Twelfth Street and Second Avenue, (later David Wojnarowicz’s studio) could come from Guys and Dolls.  It was originally the rehearsal space the once-famous “Yiddish Art Theater,” where the very young Marx Brothers, still “Minnie’s boys,” rehearsed in the same room where Peter did his great Portrait of T.C. (pictured below. T.C., herself, by the way, was a stripper.) Peter moved in during the seventies, when it was vacated by its sixties occupant, the Warhol drag star Jackie Curtis. Jackie, in turn, was in the loft through the good offices of his grandmother, a neighborhood legend known as “Slugger Ann,”  who had spent the thirties as a dime-a-dance girl in Times Square, picking up her nickname from what she did to dime-a-dancers who got a little too friendly during the slow tunes. After that, for three decades, Slugger ran a bar —”Slugger Ann’s”—kitty-corner from the loft, where she held court and micromanaged everything semi-legal (like lofts) in the neighborhood, while her grandson Jackie went from being a toddler on the barroom floor to perverse fame in Andy Warhol’s entourage.

A classic merger of Manhattan high and low. Like Peter himself.

Hujar’s early childhood was grim. The bootlegger father abandoned the waitress mother without a penny while she was pregnant. Since Rose Hujar couldn’t work keep her job in the diner and raise her son alone, she left Peter in the care of her Ukrainian mother and father on their farm in New Jersey. There Peter was at first protected by his grandmother from a passel of other relatives he remembered as a pack of screaming, ignorant, drunken, lust-and-greed driven brutes who robbed him of the natural happiness of being a little boy and filled him with a child’s resolve—later the grown man’s resolve—never, never, never to think, feel, live or breathe like any of them.

And he didn’t. The man I knew was deliberate, observant, reserved, very smart, slow to speak, a little severe; a blend of intimacy and distance for which the camera was a perfect metaphor. His manner was studied but completely unaffected. He was really incapable of phoniness. I never once saw him fake anything, and that alone made him innately elegant. The horror of New Jersey was concealed beneath the surface, an unstoppable undercurrent of anger.

The farm had one saving grace. When he was around ten, Peter was given a Brownie camera. The kid was ecstatic and—innovative from minute one—used it to take pictures of cows out in the fields. Not incidentally, Hujar kept photographing cows for the rest of his life…

As many critics have pointed out, Hujar’s animal pictures are portraits. I’d add that they are often self-portraits. The man saw himself in their faces.

That fateful Brownie was probably a gift from Peter’s mother Rose. She would often appear on the farm with a little gift for her boy. They practically gave Brownies away in those days, and those gifts mattered.

Rose spent a lifetime being bitter over all sorts of things, not least the trap motherhood had sprung on her. Was that understandable? Sure. Yet some people can get past bitterness. Rose couldn’t—and that made her an impossible mother, unable to love a son who became, in his entirely different way, impossible. (Okay. Difficult.) Mother and son were opposites with much in common. Whatever love Rose once felt for Peter slowly hardened into something grotesque, and Peter’s reciprocal bitterness about Rose—defeated love, grief indistinguishable from rage—was depthless.  Everything conspired to wreck their bond. By the end, there was nothing left but the wreckage. 

And talk about distance! Rose retired to the Bronx, but it might have been Timbuktu. When Peter became sick, she did not visit. When he was dying, she did not come. When we offered to send a car to bring her to and from his funeral mass, she said no.

Years before, when some of Peter’s work had been given a glowing review in the New York Times, he’d called Rose to tell her that he was being discussed as an important artist in America’s newspaper of record and suggested she might want to take a look. She answered in a voice of solid ice, “Peter, you know perfectly well that I don’t read the Times.”

How Hujar, around age eleven, made the transition from the sodden farm to Manhattan, and how he broke through to his destiny as an artist must be stories for another time.

Until next week!