Whether she's using sporting heroes or pop icons as her subjects, artist Elizabeth Peyton creates images that possess great verve and liveliness, writes AIDAN DUNNE
UNLIKELY AS IT might sound, there is something remarkable about paintings of people reading and writing.
What’s remarkable is that, rather than playing a role that we, the viewers look at as one might a piece of theatrical entertainment, the subject of a paintings when reading or writing points us to an interior world, an inner life with which we can identify but which we cannot see. This is so particularly when the reading and writing involves personal concerns, rather than, say, making a religious or political point.
Elizabeth Peyton’s exhibition Reading and Writing at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, sets about describing this experience of a personal inner world – her own – by evoking a mass of literary, filmic and musical references. There is hardly any reading or writing as such, though, going on in her work, and in a way the exhibition is completed by the publication that accompanies it.
The artist designed it and, apart from reproductions of her paintings and graphic work, it includes extracts from Balzac, Flaubert, the journals of the Goncourt brothers, Vincent Cronin’s biography of Napoleon, Stefan Zweig’s of Marie Antoinette, Oscar Wilde and Shakespeare, among others.
Meanwhile, the show includes studies from portraits of many of these writers and people close to them, and from film adaptations of their work. It also features still lives incorporating books, their jackets prominently displayed. Peyton’s circle of subjects also include the director Francois Truffaut and Bob Dylan.
She loves the fictions created by writers and artists, but also the artistic mileaux from which the fictions spring, and in particular the conception of artistic life that identifies the artist as a romantic outsider, and in many cases a doomed, youthful outsider.
PEYTON WAS BORN in Danbury, Connecticut in 1965, where her parents ran a candle-making business. Like many adolescents, she looked beyond the mundane reality of her local world to a more exotic realm of glamour and celebrity.
She identified with sporting heroes and with royalty – including the British royal family – and she drew wistful pictures of them. In a way, that’s what she’s been doing ever since, but in her mid-teens her interests expanded when she first heard The Clash and other contemporary music groups. And, as her IMMA show demonstrates, the range of her references have continued to expand.
Her mode of dreamy romanticism developed during her years at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, when her paintings cast friends in scenes from literary fiction. Her first solo show, in 1987, drew little response, and she worked as an artist’s assistant and as a researcher in a photographic library.
But her second show, with aspiring gallerist Gavin Brown, did get her noticed. Featuring portraits of Oscar Wilde, Napoleon and Ludwig II of Bavaria, it was installed in a room in the Chelsea Hotel and you had to make an appointment to view it.
As her work developed throughout the 1990s, her iconography expanded to encompass a number of musicians and artists, including Kurt Cobain (posthumously), Jarvis Cocker, Liam Gallagher, Eminem and, more recently, Pete Doherty, as well as her own immediate circle.
Her subject might be Keith Richards, Prince Harry, or her partner Tony Just, but all become inhabitants of Peyton’s own imaginative world by virtue of her pared down mode of stylised figuration, recogniseably derived from a naive, youthful technique, perhaps informed by Alex Katz and David Hockney. When she showed with Luc Tuymans and John Currin in 1997, several critics sensed, and relished, a small renaissance in representational painting.
As with many painters these days, she frequently uses second-hand sources such as magazine photographs, record sleeves, film stills, historical documents or pretty much anything that suits.
Her archetypal subject is a dreamy young man, a troubadour, pale and lean, not strongly characterised but with a definite sense of inner life, though she is not restricted to wan young men as a type: recently, for example, she included a portrait of Michelle Obama and her daughter Sasha in her exhibition Live Forever, which is currently touring. This chimes with past portraits of the Kennedys, as though she envisages the Obamas as America’s new royal family.
Peyton works on a small scale in a wide variety of media. Her paintings often display the use of bright, bold colours, though they are for the most part made with very thin, sketchy glazes on smoothly primed white boards.
It’s a risky way of painting to the extent that, a bit like watercolour, it works or it doesn’t, and it has to be said that her work is uneven (but then, whose isn’t?). At her best, with oil paint or pencil, she makes images with great verve and liveliness.
Her use of flowers in the still lives in Reading and Writing underline her concerns with aesthetic values, youth and transience.
She celebrates the creative spirit in its fragility, and in its willful, selfish inwardness. The Goncourt brothers obsessively documented the cultural life of their time, and presumably Peyton identifies with that pursuit. A figurine of the mythical Actaeon appears recurrently in the still lives, something that may also be a comment on her own role in relation to her subjects. Actaeon chanced to see the object of his desire, Diana, bathing, and in retaliation she changed him into a stag and hunted him down.
SO FAR, GIVE OR TAKE the occasional critical mauling, Peyton has prospered by observing and chronicling the objects of her desire. A few years back, a painting of John Lennon by her fetched $800,000 (€600,000) at auction. Admittedly that was at the height of the art market boom, but it still seems insanely excessive for an essentially slight piece of work.
Equally, Peyton’s critical admirers have tended to over-praise her, partly because of the palpable sense of relief that greeted a resurgence of aesthetic values in an art world that had diversified into all manner of abstruse theoretical practices devoid of any visual element whatsoever. Reading and Writing is a smallish, thoughtful show, and an accessible and enjoyable one.
Elizabeth Peyton: Reading and Writing. Until June 21. Irish Museum of Modern Art, Royal Hospital, Kilmainham. www.imma.ie