Live Forever
Laura Hoptman, Kraus Family Senior Curator

Over the past fifteen years, Elizabeth Peyton has created a large, remarkably consistent body of work that includes paintings, drawings, watercolors, and prints. With a handful of notable exceptions, Peyton has concentrated on making portraits of individuals ranging from historical figures, to artistic contemporaries, to friends.

Born in Connecticut, Peyton's fascination with painting and drawing people began in childhood and continued throughout her years in art school at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. In the early 1990s in New York, she was one of a very few young artists who chose to explore figurative painting, and her work, in retrospect has proven to be a paradigm of a kind of popular realism that has had a major influence on contemporary art in the US and Europe since the middle of the 1990s.

Peyton's combination of intimate scale, luscious palette, and graphic ingenuity have contributed to the accessibility of her work, but it is her subject matter—one that has included popular cultural icons like Kurt Cobain, Keith Richards, and Frida Kahlo—that has fueled its popularity, as well as made a controversial addition to the development of contemporary art over the past decade.

From her first exhibition in New York in 1994, which featured paintings of the late Kurt Cobain, critics described Peyton's works as examples of extreme fandom, an of-the-moment response to, or more critically, a result of our culture's voracious consumption of images of the famous. The Cobain paintings, which Peyton completed scarcely a year after the musician's well-publicized suicide, have become signature images, but they are far from being straightforward likenesses, let alone rock star homages. Inspired by photographs from magazines and tribute books, as well as video stills from concerts and television appearances, the Cobain that emerges from this first important series in Peyton’s oeuvre is a younger, more vulnerable version of his super-famous self, a nascent genius, but not yet an icon. Youth, and its promise, are themes that can be traced throughout Peyton's oeuvre through her choice of subjects, as can the misfortune of dying young. In addition to Cobain, Peyton has made portraits of King Ludwig II of Bavaria, Sid Vicious, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, John F. Kennedy Junior, and Lady Diana Spencer, all of whom lived the majority of their short lives in the international media spotlight before dying tragically—and publicly.

Despite early critical opinions, celebrity itself holds no fascination for the artist. As she has noted recently apropos of choosing her subjects, “Celebrity in itself is not that interesting to me, but it is interesting what people do…. I think about art and what it is in society through the people I paint and how [they] are a part of their time, maybe more than other people are.”

By 1996, Peyton had begun to paint her close circle of friends, which included artists, writers, musicians, and DJs from New York, London, and Berlin. Certain subjects, like the artist Tony Just, who Peyton met in 1999, would inspire almost two years worth of paintings, drawings, and prints depicting Just in a multitude of poses, intimate as well as formal. Like Cobain, Just's distinctive features, his long, chiseled face and large wide-set eyes, are recognizable from picture to picture, but within this matrix of similarites Peyton depicts a wide range of Justs, from the fragile dandy of Prince Eagle (Fontainebleau) (1999) to the wig-wearing hipster of Berlin (Tony) of 2000. In 2001 and 2002 Peyton would give her sustained attention to two other subjects, Ben Brunnemer and Spencer Sweeney, both artists and musicians. The choice of Brunnemer as a subject coincided with Peyton's move from Manhattan to the North Fork of Long Island in 2001. Like so many other New York painters who incorporated the light and the colors of the Long Island coast in their paintings, with the move, Peyton's palette brightened and the surfaces of her compositions became lively with pattern. It has been noted there is a particular element of stillness in many of Peyton's portraits; the paintings and works on paper produced in the North Fork in 2001 and 2002 are alive with saturated colors and bold patterns. In contrast to earlier paintings that often had neutral, unarticulated backgrounds, works like Ben Drawing (2001) or Flower Ben (2002) are fairly buzzing with incident; so much so that the subject is less the main event than an albeit important part of an overall compositional scheme more intricate than seen previously in Peyton's oeuvre. Where her earliest portraits can be compared to those of Dutch masters or Spanish painters in their quietude and focus on the aspect of a single subject in the center of the picture plane, beginning in the 2000s, Peyton's maturity as a painter is expressed in the increasing complexity of her compositions. In the history of portraiture, these later works can be more closely compared to figure compositions by Henri Matisse or Eduard Vuillard, both of whom integrated their human subjects with their static ones in dense surfaces of pattern and brilliant color.

From her earliest drawings, the artist has worked from photographs. Peyton worked for several years in the 1980s at a photo agency and used her familiarity with, and clear appreciation for, mass-media images, to create some of her most memorable works. Painters from Edgar Degas and Gustave Caillebotte to Gerhard Richter and Chuck Close have utilized the compositional quirks of photography including the cropped image, the dramatic points of view (bird's or snail's eye), the intimacy of the close-up or the candid, its ability to freeze a gesture, an expression. Peyton was at the cusp of a wave of figurative painters in the 1990s that included Peter Doig and Luc Tuymans, among others, for whom photography would be almost a compositional given. In a number of paintings made over the past decade like Tokyo (Craig) (1997) and Frida (2005) Peyton adopts the monochromatic blue, sepia, or grayish palette of black-and-white photography. Although they are portraits, these works are also paintings of photographs; still lifes in a sense, and notably, more distanced from their subjects. Over the past two years, Peyton has begun to explore more traditional still lifes, albeit with a heavy element of portraiture. Earlier portraits like Flower Ben (2002) incorporate still-life elements along with portraiture; new works like Flowers and Diaghilev (2008) and Pati (2007) also merge the genres, but the images of the subjects are subsumed, hidden even among an array of static objects, all of which, in the artist’s words “stand in for a person or a particular mood.”

In 2004 with the rental of a temporary studio in Manhattan, Peyton began to paint her subjects from life. In this series, Peyton painted the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, and her art dealer Gavin Brown, among others. The difference between the works painted from life and those painted from photos is subtle. The artist has noted that the light in these works is more natural, the colors lighter, more bleached by natural light, and the poses of the subjects less stiff and more relaxed. Peyton has continued to periodically paint from life as more recent paintings of the artists Jonathan Horowitz (2007) and Matthew Barney (2008) attest.

In 2003 Peyton painted a small landscape in the North Fork. Featuring a tree as the central motif, it can be seen as something of a portrait, and an aberration in a highly focused oeuvre, but over the past two years, Peyton has returned to landscape as a subject in the 2008 West 11th Street, Greenwich Avenue, and 7th Avenue, New York City. Slightly smaller and much more detailed than any previous painting, the work translates a busy corner of downtown New York into a lively orchestration of small slabs of color and angled line. The rakish “snail’s-eye view” reveals the origins of the composition in a photograph, but the vacuum-like stillness of her single-figure portraits has disappeared. The chaos and precariousness of a city street has been captured, but not frozen.

Peyton is a painter of contemporary daily life and her oeuvre seen in sum gives us an idea of the kind of people who have created our popular culture, and thus, an idea of our world over the past decade and a half. It is daring to be so utterly contemporary, but it furthers her goal to reach a broader public.

From her first exhibitions that took place in unconventional and public spaces like a hotel, a bar, and a private living room, to this most recent one in a museum, Peyton’s project has been a frankly populist one. Her radically contemporary subject matter and her realism make clear that her grand theme is community, one that includes her most intimate friends, a fantasy cohort of luminaries we all know but only through media images of them, and most importantly us, her viewers, who are drawn in to Peyton’s world by her work’s frank appeal to our senses and to our common mass cultural vocabulary.