Elizabeth Peyton

Introduction

Elizabeth Peyton is a conceptual artist masquerading as a painter. She is most famous for painting images of Kurt Cobain and Leonardo DiCaprio and other pop icons. Peter Schejdahl, reviewing the current show at the Whitney for the New Yorker, describes Peyton as "the moral center of the Biennial."

Discussion

Peyton's work is charming and very likeable. Its small scale (her paintings are usually less than 20 inches tall or wide) and recognizable subject matter make the work inviting. She has certain skills as a colorist and decorative designer in the tradition of Matisse and David Hockney, (Lynch 2008) with whom she shares a room at the Whitney.

But in a more sane art world, Peyton would not be in the Biennial yet. There are no surprises in her work. There's no sense of her confronting a formal problem and finding an innovative solution. In one of Hockney's paintings at the Biennial, he renders a living room couch with huge stripes of orange and white that curve over at the top. It's simple, gutsy, and unexpectedly pleasurable to look at. And it sticks with you long after you've seen the painting. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Peyton has a bored, scratchy drawing of a photograph of Walt Whitman, done as if it were a student assignment.

In many ways, Peyton is to the current scene what David Salle was to the 80's. Both are devoted to photographs as the source for their paintings. Photos have been a source for artists for over a century now, (Lynch 2008)but what makes Salle's and Peyton's use of them different is a devotion to the photograph as a physical object itself, and not just the record of a physical moment in time.

When using photographs as a source, painters must choose between rendering the image as an illusion of three-dimensional space, or treating the image as a jumping-off point for the act of building up a surface of paint on canvas. Many artists choose to go back and forth between these two ways of translating a photo within the same canvas.

Both David Salle and Elizabeth Peyton take a third way, treating the photo as a photo. Perhaps for this reason, both artists are vastly improved by photographic reproduction in books, magazines, and the web. But when you actually see Salle's painting of photograph of a woman spread-eagled, you think of the photograph, rather than the woman or the painting. And so it ...