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Elizabeth Peyton

When she emerged into the limelight in the mid-1990s, Elizabeth Peyton stood at the forefront, alongside artists such as John Currin, of a wave of artists returning to virtuosic figurative painting. At the same time, her work, and that of painters like Luc Tuymans, helped fuel the explosion of photo-based representation seen during the period. In fact, in 1997 the curator Laura Hoptman grouped Peyton, Currin and Tuymans together in a small but epochal exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. And despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that her works are most often small, delicate, stylized nearly to the point of illustration and almost hermetically concerned with her friends, lovers and celebrity crushes, Peyton has remained one of the most prominent painters in America.

Now, Hoptman has organized Peyton’s first museum survey in the United States. The exhibition of more than one hundred paintings, drawings and prints occupied two floors of the New Museum. Near the entrance were seven paintings of Kurt Cobain, the subject on which the artist’s early fame rested. The 10-by-eight-inch Kurt from 1995 shows the subject in a three-quarter view, with darkly lidded eyes, bright red lips and impossibly high cheekbones, his blond tresses set against a cerulean background. He seems as much fairy-tale princess as tragic grunge rocker. Indeed, everyone in Peyton’s paintings—from Britpop stars like the Gallagher brothers and Jarvis Cocker to Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious to the British royal family and Ludwig II of Bavaria—looks as if they wear lipstick and eyeliner. Not only do all the subjects in these images look strikingly similar—a wall label’s insistence that they represent “portraits of individuals” notwithstanding—but the artist has made all her subjects fey, feminine and non-threatening, evoking, as has often been noted, a schoolgirl’s swooning for the objects of her desire.

Yet Peyton’s facility as a painter is anything but callow. Using thinned oil on thickly gessoed panels, she limns her subjects with a bravura sketchiness that appears offhand but cannily suggests form and volume with an assured economy of means. The crayon-box simplicity of her colour similarly masks a bright sophistication. Hotel, 1966 (John Lennon), from 1996, depicts the Beatle slouching in a crimson armchair against ruby-and-orange flowered wallpaper. His white shirt has brown and purple-grey shadows, his black pants reveal green underpainting and his sapphire necktie punctuates the composition like an exclamation point. The blond boy in Piotr on Couch, from the same year, sports a lime-green shirt as he reclines on a vivid red sofa, his figure bracketed by an indeterminate violet space on the left and bottom edges and a sliver of blue jeans on the right. In paintings like these, which are among her best, Peyton achieves a kind of jewel-like luminosity.

But even while we are seduced by their beauty, it is difficult to ignore the fact that these works picture a world that is exclusionary and a bit airless, like a 1940s suburban neighbourhood with restrictive covenants. The exhibition features subjects that are almost uniformly young, attractive and willowy, and nearly exclusively white. Exceptions, of which there are less than a handful, include a few small drawings of Peyton’s ex-husband, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and a painting of Michelle and Sasha Obama, added to the exhibition with optimistic if faintly risible fanfare just after the election last November. Rather than being “paradigmatic of a populist realism,” as a wall text would have it, Peyton’s oeuvre programmatically constructs an elitist fantasy, possessed of a brittle glamour, to be sure, but nonetheless strangely homogeneous and blinkered for an artist who has made New York her home for more than two decades.

In recent years, she has broadened her scope, and, in addition to the endless parade of hipsters, both famous and unknown, she has essayed sitters such as a youngish Susan Sontag, from a photograph, and an elderly John Giorno, from life. Matthew (2008), a painting of Matthew Barney, may be the most traditionally portrait-like of her works. Sitting upright in a chair before a midnight-blue window, dark circles under his eyes, Barney appears unshaven, balding, glum and decisively middle-aged. It is a relief to see Peyton allow someone to grow old in her art, and she does so here without sacrificing the lapidary intimacy of her most compelling works.

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