Description

The work of photographer Peter Hujar defined downtown New York in the 1970s and 1980s. Paul Thek was an American sculptor and painter. Hujar and Thek met in 1956 and shared a strong intellectual and artistic connection that influenced the work of both artists. The Wonderful World That Almost Was follows the development of the intense friendship – and romance – between them, from their first encounter in Miami to the painful end of their friendship in the mid-1970s. It was during that period that Hujar and Thek produced some of their most famous and significant works, and this biography traces the ways in which these artists’ work directly and indirectly influenced both one another and the wider cultural sphere, and features the large circle of friends and artists they shared, from Andy Warhol and Fran Lebowitz, to Susan Sontag and David Wojnarowicz.

Publisher Review

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 Toibin 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 — Ben Moser 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 A dreamy epic that lays bare how two quicksilver talents forged new ways of seeing – and being. Virtuosic in its research, 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 In this masterful biography, Andrew Durbin reworks the elegiac logic of the queer past to show us Hujar and Thek’s most vital years. Awash with light and clarity, packed full of erudition and vivid detail, this important book thrums with the lives and works of its subjects. It is a love story, a history, and a moving meditation on art and memory — Jack Parlett 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 Miles A deeply original book… Andrew Durbin creates a spellbinding sense of wistful cinematic duration in his twinned account of these two incandescent iconoclasts — Wayne Koestenbaum A shimmering evocation of radical love, ambition, and loss. This detailed dual biography of elusive artists Peter Hujar and Paul Thek… 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 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 — Philip Gefter