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Nudo: An Evolving Icon

For 25 years, Nudo has distilled color into pure clarity and form. The Toi et Moi earrings extend that vision, pairing a luminous amethyst with hand-set diamond pavé in a composition that feels both precise and effortless. A study in contrast and balance, they embody jewelry worn on instinct, defined by personal style, not occasion

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Color in Motion

Nudo extends beyond a single design. With the Nudo bracelet, color unfolds across the wrist in a silhouette made to move with you. Each detail is crafted by hand and designed to catch the light. It embodies Pomellato’s creative ethos – jewelry without constraint.

Farm animals were Peter Hujar’s first subjects. The photographer’s early years were spent with his Ukrainian mother and grandparents on a farm in central New Jersey, which exposed him to the emotionality of nature. Decades before his lens moved between nocturnal vagabonds in the East Village and names such as Diana Vreeland, William Burroughs, and Fran Lebowitz, the young man realized the power of his eye. He could monumentalize any subject, even if it was an aloof cow or a dilapidated shack.

The art dealer Gracie Mansion, who gave Hujar his final exhibition—a year before his AIDS-related death in 1987, at age 53—agreed that his gaze was revelatory. “When you look at his photograph of a blanket crumpled on the back of a chair,” she told me, “you realize that it is actually a portrait of that blanket.” Mansion sometimes has to resist the impulse to turn away from the artist’s arresting black-and-white photographs, largely captured at his East Village studio, “because what you see is often so raw and intimate.”

This spring, a trio of exhibitions in Manhattan walk us through Hujar’s enigmatic images. Ortuzar will remount Peter Hujar: The Gracie Mansion Show exactly four decades after it went up in Mansion’s gallery. The 70 photographs, installed to the artist’s specifications in a two-row grid at the tiny Alphabet City storefront, now occupy the Tribeca gallery’s soaring walls in the same grid formation. Mansion remembered that she had to hire an art handler to meet Hujar’s arduously “specific spacing” demands between each photograph. “He would avoid hanging two portraits together so you could pay attention to everything equally,” she said.

Whether nude or landscape, the images possess a similar tactile texture. And the juxtapositions are gripping. A newly skinned cow hanging from its hind legs in a Germantown slaughterhouse unexpectedly complements the unsettling calm in the expression of David Wojnarowicz, another seminal East Village artist and the photographer’s longtime companion.

Ortuzar’s concurrent show, How Beautiful This Living Thing Is—organized by the author and editor Andrew Durbin, who wrote the recently released book The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek—exhibits artists who crossed paths with Hujar. The grouping begins in the late 1950s, when the emerging artist turned to professional photography, and also visited Italy for the first time. In the late 1960s and 1970s, Hujar did editorial freelancing, which brought him modest fame. Besides Wojnarowicz and Paul Thek (Hujar’s first serious love), the show features colleagues such as Ray Johnson, Greer Lankton, Sheyla Baykal, and Susan Brockman. Durbin said he visualized the show as a “poetic laboratory” and sought artists who suggested kinship to Hujar’s photography, and “who were thinking about what is inside and outside the frame.”

In late May, the Morgan Library & Museum will resume its exploration of Hujar’s art, begun in an exhibition eight years ago, with a show dedicated to his contact sheets. For Hujar: Contact, the museum’s curator and department head of photography, Joel Smith, has cherry-picked around 110 contact sheets from the 5,700 in their Peter Hujar Collection, while delving into the more intimate and process-driven aspect of Hujar’s output.

These three exhibitions come six months after the release of Ira Sachs’s film Peter Hujar’s Day, starring Ben Whishaw. “This should have happened a long time ago,” Mansion said of the burgeoning interest in Hujar’s photographs. In our age of over-manipulated and downright fake imagery, Hujar’s nuanced eye toward mortality, performance, and sexuality is enduringly authentic. “We all come into the world with masks,” said Durbin, “and he was both interested in that mask and was compelled by what was behind it.”

Thanks, Osman, and the folks at Air Mail. I hope you enjoy these occasional tastes of Air Mail’s content ahead of our fuller integration coming soon. Until then, we’re just about ready to dive into the auction season. More on that on Wednesday with our first auction report following on Friday.

Catch up with you then,

M

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