In the Custody of Love: Elizabeth Peyton at the New Museum
by CMatlin
Piotr on Couch, 1996 (detail)
Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton. At The New Museum (through January 11).
One must be careful with how one approaches the work of Elizabeth Peyton. It is too easy to dismiss her, to fault her for her own seemingly bottomless devotion to the seductions of youth and beauty as Sarah Valdez did in her review of Peyton’s 2001 show at Gavin Brown. In that review Valdez wrote that Peyton was “achingly vacant” and that her paintings hung “around like so many posters of celebrities on a pining teenager’s bedroom wall.” Her wispy, dreamy figures do recall the analogy that Valdez made: their fashion school-like illustrative qualities lend them an inherent weightlessness that seems the stuff of wistful infatuation. And yes, it’s true that Peyton loves her subjects. She admitted as much in a recent New Yorker profile by Calvin Tomkins, when she remarked: “I really love the people I paint. I believe in them, I’m happy they’re in the world.” Her enthusiasm for those she paints is apparent, and at the risk of being sentimental, this enthusiasm is not a negative. If anything it is refreshing in an art world that has not only taken to viewing any sort of unironic enthusiasm as dubious, but seems to believe that aggressive disinterest is somehow an aesthetic stance that equates belligerence with intelligence. Peyton’s love, though, is also distracting. It detracts from her paintings, taking them out of the realm of painting and transforming them into devotional objects. Her gaze often feels clouded by her worshipful relation to those she paints.
However, it is also too easy to buy into Peyton, as so many do. The accessibility of her emotions is a boon for viewers who want to have artistic intent cleanly laid out before them. It is a disservice to Peyton that these same people are only interested in her candy veneer and not in the depth that lies within her work. They only see, as Jerry Saltz wrote, “dazzling portraits of radiant youth.” Saltz is right, her paintings do have a dazzling quality to them, a dazzle that is bound in her sense of color, which is not only bold but has a depth of understanding about who her subjects are. Her fascination with youth is what should make Peyton problematic, not her love for the people she paints. If anything, Peyton’s easy relationship with the concept of love should be commended. It lends her an emotional availability and vulnerability that positions her as someone the viewer can feel sympathetic towards. She is distinctly different from her contemporary John Currin, who, up until his strangely intimate November 2006 show at Gagosian, displays an often bitter and detached vision of women that comes dangerously close to outright misogyny. Currin paints with a hunger for his subjects that is off-putting, as if he seeks to re-imagine women so that they might fit his own desires, while Peyton’s hunger is perhaps best characterized as one that seeks to reach out and touch; to feel connected with those she paints. It is this longing which envelopes her work and opens it to attack.
I cannot help but be reminded of Hart Crane’s poem “Hieroglyphic” when I think of Peyton: “Did one look at what one saw / Or did one see what one looked at?” Peyton can be accused of answering both questions. If we consider the first part of the poem — the question of looking versus seeing — the answer is apparent. No, Peyton did not look at what she saw. Instead she saw something in her subjects that negated her need to look at them. She saw the magic of youth and her own unbiased affection, but she did not look at them as human beings, because to do that would have necessitated painting them as that. Peyton transforms her muses, making them softer, more feminine, and in the process negates them as living things. At the risk of being glib, they become something else. Peyton succeeds in othering her subjects from themselves, of choosing to see in them a beauty that is available to no one but her. Nick (La Luncheonette 2002), is a profile view of a young man with delicate features. His skin is painted a mix of purple and white. He has a thick mass of black hair that blends with his body. Behind him is what looks to be a street painted in the same muted yet vibrant palette. It is a beautiful piece and a testament to Peyton’s skill with color that it does not feel outlandish and alien, but it resides more in the world of fantasy than in reality. The painting, like so much of her work is the manifestation of her dream for this world.
Peyton paints with an intuitive feeling, choosing not to capture her subjects the way they are, but how she sees them to be. To lift a line from the Importance of Being Earnest, Peyton doesn’t paint with accuracy, she paints with wonderful expression. And it is her wonderful expression that makes her work so compelling and also so aggravating. That she has no ability to stand at remove from those she paints positions her as being guilty of fawning over her subjects. Consequently Peyton answers the second question in Crane’s poem and the answer is also no, she did not see what she looked at. It may seem that this divergence between looking and seeing is paradoxical, but that is both to misunderstand the poem and discount the scope of Peyton’s vision. By committing to her own aesthetic agenda Peyton absolves herself of the responsibility of either looking or seeing. Thus she sees but does not look at her subjects while at the same time she looks at her subjects but does not see them. Her devotion obscures the faculties of her sight. And as a result of this the paintings become about the life of her own imagination, the way those she loves might be presented. To put it another way she paints the emotional sensation of her own love. Her paintings of Kurt Cobain and Liam Gallagher, the lead singer of Oasis, present them as peaceful, willowy things, two notions of them that do not come to mind when one looks at the men or listens to their music. But in Peyton’s world there is a calmness that surrounds everything. Her paintings extinguish the fires that burn inside.
However, this calming, and ultimately this longing, because what Peyton is really painting is her own longing, are where the work becomes problematic and difficult. In succumbing to her own desire the work loses rigor and reverts to the status of the dreamy sketchbook. There is no question that there is something bold and interesting in a woman portrait painter choosing to portray men in a lithesome, feminized way. In fact, were John Berger to revise Ways of Seeing he would do well to mention Peyton in his chapter on the use of women in European oil painting, as Peyton manages to offer and imbue an odd even awkward femininity to those she paints. But as interesting as it is, this action, whether conscious or not, ultimately feels like a lack of rigor, as if she couldn’t be bothered to attempt an unstylized rendering. Regardless of the fact that the people she paints are famous, an argument against her that has always been hollow and a little lacking in rigor itself, her paintings falter because of her own longing. So intent is Peyton on translating her love to that powerful rectangle that she gets lost in the magic of the experience of art making. She paints with so much fondness for her subjects that she paints them out of existence. Peyton has said that she is overwhelmed with the passing of time and this is evident in her paintings. She seeks to capture those she loves and hold them forever, lest the ravages of time claim them before she does.
Unfortunately, time has caught up with her subjects but Peyton, surprisingly, has adjusted to this, as reflected in her mid-career survey, “Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton,” at the New Museum. Those that love Peyton will continue to love her and those that hate her most likely will not be swayed, as their prejudices run too deep and are often well founded. Yet those who are willing to reconsider their position on Peyton’s work will not necessarily be rewarded but will come away with the sense that there is more to Peyton than was previously evident.
Comprised of 104 works, there are many paintings that will irk Peyton’s detractors, from the overly delicate paintings of Kurt Cobain to the self-conscious charcoal and ink drawings of Ludwig II of Bavaria from her 1993 show at the Chelsea Hotel. But something happened to Peyton’s work starting around 2003; she seems to have given up her fight against time and has instead come to accept it if not embrace it. Green Nick and Walt (both from 2003) are simple colored pencil line drawings portraits that show an emerging restraint. One would expect, based on her work from the 1990s, that Peyton would make these men more delicate than they are, instead Peyton draws them as men and not as anachronistic Victorian dandy fantasies. Peter (Pete Doherty) (2005) is a startling watercolor on paper. Peyton has succeeded in capturing the beaten up and worn out quality that exemplifies Doherty, lead singer of The Libertines and Babyshambles. His vacant eyes, a motif that frequently appears in Peyton’s work, here make sense. Doherty doesn’t feel longed for. The love is there but it has been replaced by a sadness for the life he has chosen to live. Her paintings are losing their weightlessness, replaced by a real sense of, if not gravity, then concreteness that before was missing. Jonathan (Jonathan Horowitz) (2007) shows the artist Jonathan Horowitz scruffy and middle-aged sitting in a chair. His blue eyes are alive and intense. It is unclear that in the past Peyton would have had the inclination to paint these bright, real things as such. This is not to say that there aren’t stumbles, she still has an inherent preciousness and her paintings from magazine images and movies feel like throwaway exercises, as evident in the interesting but ultimately empty painting of Michelle Pfeifer and Daniel Day-Lewis from Days of Innocence.
Yet it is not “girly art,” or at least it is moving away from that, as Roberta Smith concluded in her review of the exhibition. And though Smith ultimately gives “Live Forever” a positive review and does not mean for her characterization of Peyton’s art to be a pejorative, she does Peyton a disservice by classifying the work as “girly.” For it is assertions like this that only serve to reinforce the tired idea that bearing one’s emotions for the world to see is a distinctly feminine act. Peyton is not an aggressive artist, she is not Jenny Saville — a fellow portrait painter whose works are so startling that one cannot help but be overwhelmed by them — she is instead a painter of softness and emotion. Her art is imperfect and at times too self-absorbed but she is worthy of consideration because she strives to display love as an actual thing. Camus wrote of being in the custody of love and the wonder of a loving heart.
It is our relation to these things that allows us to feel an exalted emotion. While not Camus, Peyton nonetheless strives for the same thing in her work. We may fault her for subject matter and longing but we must accept the sentiment that she commits to. For in an increasingly divisive and unloving world perhaps it is enough to try, even if the execution is suspect, and bring a little love into it.
