The Brooklyn Rail

When Paul Thek visited Italy in 1963 at the age of thirty, he experienced a profound artistic awakening. Coming from New York, the epicenter of a post-war art world dominated by abstract and proto-abstract painting, Thek’s eyes opened onto a larger corpus of Western visual expression. The morgue-cum-installation Capuchin Catacombs left the artist, and his romantic (and frequent studio) interlocutor at the time, Peter Hujar, particularly touched. Thek’s subsequent evolution is the stuff of avant-garde lore. Paul Thek: Untitled Sketchbook is a newly released facsimile of a sketchbook Thek filled during this period, in the late sixties. The publication could be mistaken for a genuine midcentury artifact, reproduced faithfully with spiral binding.

Over the course of approximately forty sketches, one observes the petri dish of ideas cultured during a fertile moment in Thek’s career. Still lifes, anatomical studies, and self-portraits emerge alongside the quirky, poetic asides one expects (such as a mushroom umbrella with fish raining upon it), but is still pleased to find, in the artist’s work. The sketchbook is a microcosm of his artistic maturation, capturing a mind in quiet, probing transformation.

The sketchbook is also indulgently Italian. On the second page, Thek draws a pair of work gloves resting gently palm-to-palm. The softness of the forms approaches a drapery study a la “Pietá,” troubled only by an oversized mushroom sprouting from one finger. Just two pages later, Cy Twombly-esque scribbles circle the date “12-30-69.”

Thek’s earliest sculptures after his trip to Europe were thick slabs of wax modeled into cross-sections of meat, like remnants from a butcher shop, marking a dramatic shift from the figurative painting he had employed previously. Embodying flesh and blood, abstractions of anatomy entombed in pristine specimen cases built by the artist, the works signified his move away from the machine of the New York art world. These so-called “Technological Reliquaries” formed the basis of his first solo show, at Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery in 1964.

As Thek’s ideas evolved, the corporeal gave way to a more symbolic engagement with the body. Sculptures featured disembodied limbs-hands, arms, legs-cast in wax and painted in saturated, yet off-kilter tones (moss green, seashell pink). The figures, accessorized with human hair, clothing and jewelry, moved further into assemblage.

What’s striking in the sketchbook, in light of Thek’s exhibited work, is the artist’s unexpected technical prowess as a draftsman, particularly in his self-portraits. On another early page, a small rendering of his face appears to emerge from and recede into the paper’s center. Three quick pencil strokes suggest the slope of his shoulders and a few more make up the contours of his hair. His eyes seem, at first, to peer from behind glasses—but are more likely encircled by heavy bags that meet his eye sockets too neatly. The only part of this small drawing that looks labored over, incredibly, is the triangular shadow cast beneath the artist’s neck.

As the book continues, self-portraits accumulate and overlap, drawn at different angles and scales, with margin asides-practicing facial expressions, hair, nose shapes. Midway through, isolated body parts begin to predominate: legs, feet, arms, hands, a delicately drawn flaccid phallus. One imagines Thek reclining with a mirror, studying his own anatomy. Here his hand is rendered as well, caught in the act of drawing.

The sketchbook’s later pages are peppered with crucifixion studies, echoing the spiritual and bodily themes that would come to define Thek’s mature performance work, as well as continuations of the artist’s hand. By 1970, Thek’s interest in the body, death and preservation had transcended formal sculpture in his public practice as well. Perhaps the trajectory of his sketches underlines a quiet realization that the most representational portrait of an artist may not include facial likeness at all.

His gesamtkunstwerk, The Tomb, presented in 1967, featured an inverted ziggurat painted millennial pink. Inside, an effigy of the artist lay on the floor, cast from his own body, fully clothed, eyes closed, tongue lolling to the side. Painted head to toe in pink, the figure—later colloquially called “Dead Hippie”—was surrounded by selected objets (decorative objects), arranged as if in a shrine. Shortly after The Tomb debuted, Thek returned to Italy. Europe remained a semi-permanent base for much of the remainder of his career, which ended prematurely, in 1988, when he died of AIDS-related complications.

Given Thek’s impulse toward physicality in his exhibited oeuvre, this rare glimpse into his working process feels remarkably intimate, akin to seeing Hujar’s many documentary images of Thek working in his studio. In the artist’s drawings we see what Thek saw as he moved through the world: how his hand appeared mid-sketch, where he stood amidst a clutter of studio materials, and what he saw looking back at himself when passing a mirror. The result is a deeply lucid record of an artist’s fleeting, improvisational thoughts.