Peter Hujar
American, 1934-1987
Dean Savard Reclining
INV-2662
Peter Hujar
American, 1934-19871984
Dean Savard Reclining
Peter Hujar American, 1934-1987 →photographyphotograph
Date
1984
Medium
Gelatin silver print
Dimensions
Image: 37.5 × 37.5 cm (14 3/4 × 14 3/4 in.); paper: 50.8 × 40.7 cm (20 × 16 in.)
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Location
Chicago, IL
Credit
Photography and Media Purchase Fund
Dean Savard reclines on a wood floor with raised arms framing his face and a pillow tucked under his tousled hair. Seeming to exist between sleep and wakefulness, a gentle smile spreads across his lips. An artist and gallerist, Savard ran Civilian Warfare Gallery with his friend Allan Barrows in New York’s East Village between 1982 and 1987. At the gallery, they hosted parties, painted, and showed works by local artists, many of them friends, including Greer Lankton and David Wojnarowicz.
Barrows recalled Hujar’s ability to “pull out [the sitter’s] soul through the camera.” Here Hujar has captured Savard’s signature style—suspenders without a shirt—and has also hinted at his subject’s tendency to drink and use drugs to excess by depicting him in a possibly unconscious state.
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