Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek

Description:

"A proper resurrection, fertile and vivacious." --Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times

"As official narratives everywhere strain and crack, Peter and Paul--and Durbin--offer a desperately needed alternative way of seeing and being." --Benjamin Moser, author of Susan Sontag: Her Life and Work, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

"A jam-packed poem in prose. It's like a trip with these guys, without pulling tight at the ending, just death." --Eileen Myles, author of a "Working Life"

The cinematic, never-before-told story of two intimately entangled artists who redefined queer art.

When Paul Thek met Peter Hujar in the winter of 1956 in Coral Gables, Florida, a slow-simmering connection began to burn. Thek, twenty-three and living in Miami, was handsome and itching to make it as a painter; in the twenty-two-year-old Hujar, a shy, sensual photographer, he'd found a kindred spirit. By 1960, they were dating and living in New York, beginning decades of sex, love, competition, and reconciliation--an entanglement that changed American art forever.

Surrounded by a robust creative scene populated by Susan Sontag, Andy Warhol, Fran Lebowitz, John Waters, and David Wojnarowicz, Thek and Hujar's profoundly influential careers, from the early 1960s through the late 1980s, differed as much as the men themselves. The unpredictable and often overlooked Thek crafted visceral installations and sculptures, while Hujar, celebrated and sociable, took penetrating portraits of his world, queer and otherwise. Yet even at their most estranged, and even after their deaths from AIDS, both men were united by a pursuit of liberation--from artistic and sexual limits, from anything short of changing the world.

Andrew Durbin's The Wonderful World That Almost Was unravels, for the first time, the intertwined stories and work of two boundary-burning, paradigm-tilting, never-more-relevant American artists. Weaving together deft art criticism with moving portraits of both men's inner lives, and assembled with exhaustive research, Durbin's book is an ode to a lost but still-living world--and two men who defined it.

Brief description: Andrew Durbin is the editor in chief of frieze magazine. He is the author of the novels MacArthur Park, which was a finalist for the Believer Book Award, and Skyland, and served as the editor for Kevin Killian's posthumous work Fascination. His writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, The Believer, The Paris Review online, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He lives in London.

Review Quotes:

"Beguiling . . . [a study of] the unconventional, partly hidden forms that love can take . . . a proper resurrection, fertile and vivacious." --Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times Book Review

"The Wonderful World That Almost Was . . . not only gives Thek and Hujar back their lives; it gives its readers a new perspective on work that is both effervescent and rigorous."
--Jessica Ferri, The Atlantic

"Gorgeous . . . With meticulous research and skillful storytelling . . . Durbin resurrects his subjects with care and clarity. You feel, at the book's end, that these are people you've known your whole life. Not much of their world remains, that world of writing letters, of a thriving art ecosystem. Durbin's remarkable book is a guide to living for creation, for friendship--living as legacy." --Conor Williams, Los Angeles Review of Books

"An important piece of literary recovery in queer art." --Alexander Cheves, The Guardian

"An exquisitely told, novelistic narrative, lifting two artists, underappreciated in life, out of the obscure depths of American art history." --MZ Adnan, The New Statesman

"Intimate and vibrant . . . Andrew Durbin reveals how the painter and sculptor Paul Thek and the photographer Peter Hujar slipped from the center of the New York creative scene to obscurity . . . [Durbin] offers a tender yet unflinching view of their choices, thoughts, feelings, what made them lovable, and what made them difficult to be with." --Chloë Ashby, The Guardian

"The Wonderful World is luscious and absorbing . . . Durbin's writing is passionate, and novelistic in scope; it is also scholarly and precise where it needs to be about the art practices of both men." --Moyra Davey, 4Columns

"The Wonderful World That Almost Was traces the queer, international lives of two of the twentieth century's most enigmatic artists . . . [Durbin] is masterful when it comes to animating his subjects and weaving a compelling narrative without taking biographical liberties." --Emily Dinsdale, AnOther Magazine

"This engrossing new biography of Hujar and his long, complicated relationship with the artist Paul Thek explains how the two men collaborated and competed, and in doing so changed the course of American art. It's a smart, compelling look at the art world, mid-twentieth-century queer life, and the lasting impact of creative genius." --Town & Country

"More than simply a study of two creatives in love, the book shows how Hujar and Thek's romance acted as a generative force, helping both to bloom as artists and as gay men." --Alex Greenberger, Art in America

"Durbin's astute portrait of these two artists, incisive witnesses of their times and cultural vanguards of ours, restores an important chapter in art history and makes for sublime reading." --Booklist (starred review)

"Transcendent . . . A loving elegy to artists living in a time before AIDS shattered the artistic and cultural worlds of New York City." --BookPage (starred review)

"Durbin's excellent biography brings renewed attention to two creators whose works deserve a closer look." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Illuminating . . . A captivating portrait of a vibrant creative era." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Like an archaeologist sifting through the plastic rubble of the recent past, Andrew Durbin has peeled back layers and layers to reveal two artists once dismissed as 'footnotes, ' restoring them and their lost world to a central place in our history. As official narratives everywhere strain and crack, Peter and Paul--and Durbin--offer a desperately needed alternative way of seeing and being." --Benjamin Moser, author of The Upside-Down World and Susan Sontag: Her Life and Work

"This is a great American love story that is also an indispensable account of the growth and emergence of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek as influential artists." --Colm Tóibín

"An era long lost becomes vividly tangible in these pages. Surprisingly relevant for today, the two protagonists' paths through the 1950s and '60s pre-Stonewall times shine up in ways I had never been able to grasp before. Andrew Durbin turns his almost forensic research into a seriously entertaining read." --Wolfgang Tillmans

"I don't think I've ever read a biography I'd describe as tender before. Is that because this one's about a relationship, coming and going in a world full of change and detail, travel, and being both unmoored and ecstatic? This book is totally about the failure of love and revolutions and how our presence in and out and around those states is how we know we're alive. The secret star of the book is Paul Thek's collaborator, artist Ann Wilson, who sees it all. Andrew Durbin does too, and has made of these lives and these times a jam-packed poem in prose. It's like a trip with these guys, without pulling tight at the ending, just death." --Eileen Myles, author of a "Working Life"

"In his lifetime, photographer-flaneur Peter Hujar was overlooked and under-recognized. Not by his downtown bohemian friends--Andy Warhol, Candy Darling, Susan Sontag, Fran Lebowitz--but by the art-going public. Yet he understood sexual glamour as well as Richard Avedon, psychic damage as well as Diane Arbus, and seedy spectacle as well as Robert Mapplethorpe. Critic Peter Schjeldahl placed him at the 'historic crossroads of high art and low life in the late twentieth century.' Where anyone who knows what's what wants to be. And where we get to be thanks to Andrew Durbin's masterful double portrait (of Hujar and his lover, artist Peter Thek), a work that is as aesthetically ferocious as it is historically erudite." --Lili Anolik, bestselling author of Didion & Babitz

"A dreamy epic that lays bare how two quicksilver talents forged new ways of seeing--and being. Virtuosic in its research and humming with sultry detail, Andrew Durbin's biography thrusts us into the thick of the action, hot on the heels of dual meteors in search of the sublime." --Jeremy Atherton Lin, author of Deep House and Gay Bar

"From the cliffs of Ponza to the piers of Manhattan, Andrew Durbin's The Wonderful World That Almost Was is a shimmering evocation of radical love, ambition, and loss. This detailed dual biography of elusive artists Peter Hujar and Paul Thek--with strong supporting cameos from Sheyla Baykal, Linda Rosenkrantz, Susan Sontag, and Ann Wilson--pries open a polite history of twentieth-century art, inserting their tempestuous relationship as a cipher for each artist's trailblazing work and the profound stakes of that creative freedom." --Prudence Peiffer, author of The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever

"Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, devastatingly undervalued during their lifetimes, met as they began groundbreaking art careers that are only now attracting huzzahs and serious study. Theirs was a liberating lovership friendship until the connection cracked behind Thek's restlessness and Hujar's prickliness. Vivid and richly detailed, this biography of their relationship also evokes the texture of bohemian life in the sixties, both the struggles and the seemingly endless possibilities." --Cynthia Carr, author of Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar

"A deeply original book, saturated with melancholy longing for a historical moment (past and future) when art and love could come together with a synchronized, quicksilver suddenness. Andrew Durbin creates a spellbinding sense of wistful cinematic duration in his twinned account of these two incandescent iconoclasts." --Wayne Koestenbaum

"This high-concept dual biography is at once ambitious, authoritative, and insightful; that it also resonates on the page like a tasty novel is Andrew Durbin's inspired gift to the reader. He writes knowingly about the ache of romantic longing, the urgency to make an enduring art, the many ways Hujar and Thek embodied the culture of their time as it bubbled up from the streets to become, finally, legendary artists of an era." --Philip Gefter, author of Cocktails with George and Martha and What Becomes a Legend Most