Romanticism died in New York in 1979. Or did it?

On Sunday I saw this series of photographs at the Panic Attack! Exhibition at the Barbican in London. The set is called Arthur Rimbaud in New York (1978-1979), by David Wojnarowicz, and consists in a series of twenty-four black-and-white gelatin silver prints showing a friend of the artist wearing a mask of Rimbaud, photographed in a variety of sordid New York settings.

The following text is an extract from an essay by David Kuspit, which can be found here, on the Queer Cultural Center website:

“Wojnarowicz’s identification with Rimbaud is clear, and there is a startling resemblance between their lives, and even their art. (…)
Wojnarowicz was born in 1954, exactly a century after Rimbaud, and died in 1992, living one year longer than Rimbaud, who died in 1891. Both were the products of broken homes and abusive parents; both ran away from provincial homes to the big city; both traveled widely; both were gay. Both needed a loving relationship with an idealized father figure and artistic mentor to stimulate and support their own art—Paul Verlaine in the case of Rimbaud, the photographer Peter Hujar in Wojnarowicz’s case—and both were violent personal- ties—Rimbaud eventually shot Verlaine, and death and destruction run rampant in Wojnarowicz’s imagery.”