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, he was one of the essential 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 beautiful, optically pristine photographs about a scene on the verge of vanishing.
Hujar had his share of female muses, mostly artists and writers, and his portraits of women represent some of the most charismatic works in the show. His first muse was Daisy Aldan, a poet who taught his English class in high school, in Manhattan. His portrait of her from 1955, the earliest work here, emits a whiteness, 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, 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, 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-old. She is shown half-reclining in bed, propped up on her elbows, boldly meeting the viewer’s gaze. She can put you in mind of Manet’s daring model, Olympia, except that she is on polka-dot sheets that clash loudly with her op-art wallpaper. Clearly, 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, 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 show gives Hujar his full due. It is late in coming, and naturally it’s sad 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 cut their losses and be like everyone else. He himself was clearly all-in — especially in the empathy department, which adds additional appeal to his work in our singularly un-empathic era.
The Morgan Library and Museum
through May 20, 2018