Uncommon people
Elizabeth Peyton claims that she isn't all that interested in celebrity. Nor does she warm to the term "portrait" as a descriptor for what she does. Never mind that the art-world superstar, arguably the most prominent female painter of the late 20th century, has built her career making, well, portraits of celebrities. In countless interviews and articles, Peyton claims her paintings -- vulnerable, blushingly intimate images of angelic hipster boys -- to be simply "pictures of people." Whatever you want to call it, she is the Joan of Arc of the genre, heroically breathing new, contemporary life into a once-dead-and-dusty form of painting.
It just so happens that these "people" are of the iconic, instantly recognizable variety. There are the alt-culture idols: Kurt Cobain, Sid Vicious, Elliott Smith, the Gallagher brothers, Jarvis Cocker of Pulp. There are the hipsters-through-history, political figures known (among other things) for their decadence and fashion: Napoleon, the mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, a posh and ruddy-cheeked Prince Harry. And even when she trains her eye on her not-so-famous friends, the gorgeous unknowns of her New York art-world coterie -- Polish artist Piotr Uklanski, her ex-lover and muse Tony Just -- their dandyish flair and tussled mops scream subculture stardom.
It's a parade of indie cool, and it has taken over Walker Art Center in a mid-career retrospective that represents the artist's first major survey in the United States. "Live Forever," which is visiting from the New Museum in New York City, hangs until June, when it takes off again for London and the Netherlands.
You can't paint pictures of pretty boys without catching a bit of flak. Although a good deal of the work was made during the 1990s, at age 43 Peyton's continued obsession with the pale, rail-thin rocker/artist set borders on an age-inappropriate fetish -- an observation that has drawn occasional scorn from critics, who have delighted in portraying her work as girly and "lite," the naive sketches of a boy-crazy teen.
"I say it again and again -- the point [in painting these portraits] wasn't celebrity in itself," Peyton claims in a conversation with New Museum curator Laura Hoptman circulated by the Walker. "It was what these people did. Because if it was about celebrity, I'd be making pictures of Michael Jackson."
When asked how she chooses her subjects, Peyton responds, "Well, there is no choosing. It's just who I'm very interested in, and identify with, and see as very hopeful in the world. I see them as very great role models, and heroic in that they can go through their own daily lives, and manage to create something and transcend what they come from. And also realize that they are individuals."
Sound like a dodge? It isn't.
The literal subject of Peyton's work is sort of a red herring. Actually, many of her portraits bear only a vague resemblance to their celebrity sources (the show includes a shockingly sexy rendition of Al Gore as a young man). Peyton isn't really painting people. She's painting intangible auras of greatness -- artistic, political or otherwise. She teases them into visibility through deft brushwork, a glistening color palette, and a Proustian ability to combine past, present and future into one exquisite singularity. What she's really interested in, Peyton has said, is "that moment when a person's worth and destiny are revealed, whether to themselves or to the world."
We're not talking grandeur here. We're talking humanity, and velvet-gloved sensitivity. Peyton's portraits have never been aggrandizing advertisements for supermen. Rather, they are startling, demure glimpses of real people on the cusp of something remarkable. Everything about "Live Forever," from the tiny sizes of the paintings to the way Peyton's loose, watery brush strokes threaten to slide right off their surfaces, underscores this delicate theme. Hoptman notes in her conversation with the artist that the size of the portraits "is enormously human and intimate, and not meant to tower over but to be, in a way, in equality with the way that we look at the pictures."
In fact, the mood of Peyton's work is so demure, and the scale of her paintings so wee, that she was initially reluctant to thrust them out into the traditional showrooms of contemporary art at all. Her first and most legendary show was hung in a private room in the infamous Chelsea Hotel. Visitors simply asked for the key to Room 828, walked upstairs and passed an extremely personal moment alone with Peyton's work. "It was an outrageous and brilliant idea," says Walker curator Betsy Carpenter. "The place exudes drama and the pains of human suffering" -- perfect for Peyton's sensibilities. "And it was the reverse of the Duchampian concept of bringing found objects into a formal gallery."
Peyton went on to slyly place her paintings in a London pub and in the women's bathroom of a SoHo restaurant. The everyday settings suggested a populist intention that often went against the bulldozing fame of her subjects.
Carpenter, who partnered with Peyton to hang the show, deserves credit for preserving this vibe of intimacy. The fear, of course, is that the Walker's cavernous white galleries might swallow the small works. But positioned at chest level like tiny portholes, each becomes a private window, inviting a one-on-one moment. Peyton's lush, verdant palette -- she is one of the better colorists in the art market right now -- glistens on the walls, each portrait hanging like a mouthwatering piece of fruit. Staring at the chartreuse shirt in "Piotr on the Couch," a knockout of a painting featuring the Polish boy sprawled on a couch implied by swept strokes of red, I actually taste lime.
Another favorite is "Blue Liam," a portrait of the Oasis lead singer, his countenance flooded with washed-out blue. Dark bags sink under his eyes, and a pair of red lips blaze through the paleness. "Zoe's Kurt" -- just one of an entire room dedicated to Cobain images -- is celestial, with the porcelain-faced rocker seeming to fade into the wall behind the painting.
The only point where the show lost me was "Jarvis and Liam Smoking." Here, Mr. Cocker, bedecked in Blublockers, cradles a flame for his rock colleague's cigarette. The gesture is one of ultra-cool exclusivity: the type of pure hip that most mortals will never know. It's the only painting in the show that makes me feel like an outsider, the accusations of Peyton's glamour-worship ringing true for a second.
But above all, Peyton's interest in her subjects is genuine, earnest. "Elizabeth Peyton really comes through as a humanist," notes Carpenter, and "Live Forever" highlights "an intensity to her sincerity. [She represented] a break from a more conceptual and ironic moment toward a more figurative one."
In other words, Peyton's work isn't an arrow to the brain, loaded with guile and smarty-art cleverness. It's the rare celebrity-centered project not drowned in cynicism, suspicion and contempt.
"I remember a collector coming in and asking me, 'Do you really like these people?' " Peyton recalls. "And I said, 'I love them.'"
