Hilton Als

1. Article · Sep 7, 2026 · Hilton Als

   Willem de Kooning’s Excavations of Intimacy (opens the original)

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   Drawings, like dreams, can often feel open-ended, prompting a multiplicity of thoughts. As painting’s poor cousins, they usually command a lesser fee in the art market, and their position somewhat to the left of capital may account—at least in part—for the fantastic, unfixed energy you often find in them: an artist draws not in the service of a career but in search of a self. Drawings, for me, are a kind of calligraphy of the soul, and, as you take in “Willem de Kooning Drawing” (at th

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2. Article · Jul 17, 2026 · Hilton Als

   Paul Thek’s Eclectic Art (opens the original)

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   The art world loves a tie-in—a book or a movie that provides an occasion to “reframe” certain artists. In recent months, Andrew Durbin’s very fine biography “The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek” has helped to promote two artists whom younger viewers in particular may have been only tangentially aware of. Paul Thek (1933-88) is the subject of two shows up now, at the Galerie Buchholz (through July 25), and at Pace (through Aug. 14). Each offers cre

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3. Article · Jul 17, 2026 · Hilton Als

   Peter Hujar’s Search for Secrets (opens the original)

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   It’s a fine measure of the curator Joel Smith’s visual and emotional acuity that the first standout images one encounters on entering “Hujar:Contact,” his fabulous show of Peter Hujar’s photographs and contact sheets (at the Morgan Library, through October 25th), are of the performer, writer, and director Jackie Curtis. Hujar, who was a friend of Curtis’s, photographed him, circa 1970, in Jackie drag. (Curtis alternated between “boy” Jackie and “girl” Jackie throughout his to

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