Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton
October 8, 2008 to January 11, 2009
The New Museum
235 Bowery, between Stanton and Rivington streets, New York City, 212 219 1222

As existentialist injunctions go, “Measure your own grave” and “Live forever” could be said to represent polar opposites, literally of heaven and earth.  And yet, the painters to whom these phrases serve as titles for their museum surveys, respectively at the Modern and the New, are anything but opposed.  It is not as if, for instance, Elizabeth Peyton has the exclusive on ethereality, Marlene Dumas on groundedness.  Indeed, Peyton and Dumas, though of  different ages and with markedly contrastive personal histories, could be construed as soul sisters.

In the manner of that Greek legend where different maidens lined up to inspire separate body parts for the statue of a goddess, these two artists could almost be enlisted to collaborate on a portrait of the postmodern (not to mention post-feminist) condition, one that in painterly touch and depictive attitude alike is torn between intimacy and remoteness, memory and visceral presence.  And this collaboration would take place without a major compromise on either’s part in terms of modus operandi, touch, or – even, really – philosophy.

Both paint thin in a way that is no mere matter of personal handwriting: thinness equates to a state of alienation towards, or skepticism about, the expressive capacity of paint.  There is a kind of laid back alla prima in both bodies of work: a sense of watery, muted color soaking into the support, in Dumas’s case, as if images resulted as much from accidental spillage as gestural intention.  In Peyton, perfunctory but unurgent delivery ensures an effect that is lively and slight: her painterly smear ensures at least low octane empathy while surfaces feel mildly distressed.

They are both soulful and emotionally invested in what they choose to paint but are in no hurry to “master” their subjects or materials.  Indeed, their touch ensures a sense of humbleness towards the act of depiction.  Words that work equally for both women are fey expressionism.

In stylistic genealogy, a strking common progenitor is Edvard Munch: consider Peyton’s September (Ben) (2001) and Dumas’s The Visitor (1995) for a lyrical angst that looks back to Munch.

And this shared ancestor aside, Dumas and Peyton are both self-enslaved to the photograph as source and avatar of their imagery.  Recently, Peyton has begun (or returned) to working from life, the implications of which are yet to unfold; but hitherto a tension between emotional investment and physical separation worked itself out in relation to her dependence on mediated images, and a yearning for visceral connection across a temporal divide, a desire to know the unknown. In Dumas, the insistence on working from found, mediated images with the sense of remove that that engenders seems like an act of political defiance rather than a personal style choice.

Body and Soul
In the divisions of labor regarding that collaboration I envisaged, there is no question that Dumas should be assigned the body.  Her figuration is marvelously gutsy.   Bodies sit solidly on the canvas or paper even when there is a thin, washy effect, and pivot the composition, even when there is knowing naïveté in the draftsmanship.  She puts light on limbs delectably, even in images of torture and exploitation.  And sex really matters to her.  This comes across not just in the many paintings that deal with the sex industry but also in other body images, even those of infants or corpses.  She is a supremely erotic artist—paint, politics and the body are all aligned to arouse.

Peyton, by the same token, should be left the face—although Dumas is no slouch in that department. Arguably the pinnacle of Dumas’s superbly installed MoMA show is the chapel-like anteroom housing Black Drawings (1991-92), 111 drawings and one work on slate of approximately nine-by-seven inches each.  These initially slight, schematic, generic faces in their gridded ranks reveal sensitive individuality.  With exceptions, Dumas’s faces are anonymous individuals extracted from the body politic – as likely chosen for some social slight or economic marginalization that they represent as for their personal look. Peyton’s faces, on the other hand, are iconic individuals—celebrities, culture heros, personal friends—who are saints in a private religion of nostalgia, doomed youth, and exalted bohemia.

Ironically, where Dumas personalizes the anonymous, Peyton standardizes the individual.  There is an unmistakable Peyton stamp to any face that narrows the eyes, heightens the lips, feminizes the cheekbones and hardens the jaw into a generic type.  In this sense she is like a Byzantine icon painter who, in her devotion to the individual, connects to a universal.

Dumas and Peyton are united in their limitations as well as their strengths—and, arguably, in their capacity to ensure that their limitations are strengths.  Dumas’s photo-dependency gives her imagery political edge.  Denial of sensory depth almost punishes viewers for yearning for it, reminding them of the urgencies of injustice and exploitation that this art – and their consciences – should be addressing.  Her chromophobia is that of Guernica, a direct reference to the black and white of news reportage (a residual association that survives in a color TV age, somehow signaling “news” to all generations.)

Peyton’s style wallows in its own patheticism, as if cloying, ephemeral, illustration techniques are symptoms of self-pity.  Such knowingly retarded means sit perfectly with the basically adolescent emotion she taps, which is that of star-struck infatuation.  The miracle in Peyton is that, despite such one-dimensionality of form and content alike, she is able to pull off both an iconic magnetism in individual works and a sense of an integral personal world across the corpus of her oeuvre.

Ancien Régime
The striking contrast between these two shows lies not with the artists so much as their curators.  Having once tried to borrow a Dumas painting for a group exhibition, and having seen a disappointing show of her work at (it just so happens) the New Museum, at its old, Broadway location some years ago, I can vouch for the fact that she can be an uneven painter.  You wouldn’t know that from Cornelia Butler’s spritely selection and meticulously paced installation.  Peyton, on the other hand, has been let down by Laura Hoptman’s visually tasteless and thematically thoughtless hang.  We get no sense of development in her work, despite a vaguely chronological hang, nor of shape in her constellation of infatuees.  Peyton’s reputation rests, in part, on the ability of a single small picture on a large museum wall to galvanize attention.  Live forever, an object lesson in more being less, is a potentially lethal overdose for this youngish artist’s reputation.

But curatorial problems can hardly account for the negative vibes her show has elicited, if not in the printed record then at least in verbal responses I have been monitoring from people I trust.  There has been a curious, consistent argument that aligns Peyton to the wrong politics. One artist felt that Mary Heilmann and Peyton represented an aesthetic choice as stark – and related to – the political choice facing the nation, while a week after the election another painter opined that Peyton seemed to her so ancien régime, as if Obama will free us of celebrity worship and style recyling. This seemed harsh when Peyton had rushed out a portrait of Michelle and Sasha Obama at the Democratic Convention, a picture inserted in the show after it had opened, even if apposite in relation to, say, Picnic (M.A.) after Sofia Copploa’s Marie Antoinette, not to mention countless doting portraits by Peyton of Princess (as the Queen then was) Elizabeth and other wistful Windsors.

But there seems to be a strange insistence on the part of otherwise savvy commentators to see Peyton’s personalism and knowing slightness of style as inherent (moral) limitations rather than to appreciate the integrity of her compact between content and style – the strength, in other words, of her flimsiness. Conversely, there is an assumption that the humanism and political engagement in Dumas, with its somber hues and agitprop urgency, makes her work correspondingly more serious.  I admire Dumas, and can certainly sense that her politics gives her work gravitas where Peyton’s patheticism lends hers levity.  But gravitas isn’t substance per se, nor is levity lack of it.  Or, put another way, Gericault may be a more important artist than Puvis, but it isn’t because the former paints corpses and the latter nymphs.

Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave was organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in association with MoMA, and was on view in LA June 22 to September 22, 2008. The exhibition catalogue, published by Moca and Distributed Art Publishers, Inc, contains texts by Butler, Dumas, Lisa Gabrielle Mark, Matthew Monahan and Richard Shiff.

Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton will travel to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; and the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht. The exhibition catalogue, published by Phaidon, has texts by Laura Hoptman, Iwona Bazwick, and John Giorno.

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A fitting image to mark the sixtieth birthday of the royal princes’ father, Prince Charles, and to remind readers of the Review Panel tonight, at which Peyton’s show at the New Museum will be discussed along with shows of Sue Coe, Lothar Baumgarten and Ron Gorchov.

This was an artcritical PIC in November 2008.

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November 14, 2009 at the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts, New York

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Ana Finel Honigman, Joe Fyfe, and Mario Naves joined David Cohen to review Lothar Baumgarten at Marian Goodman, Sue Coe at Gallerie St. Etienne, Ron Gorchov at Nicholas Robinson, and Elizabeth Peyton at the New Museum.

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Part I: May 23- July 18, 2004
Part II: July 25- September 12, 2004

This summer’s exhibition at the Parrish had a simple premise: to survey recent work by artists who live and work at least part of the time on the eastern end of Long Island. Figural imagery abounded: painted, photographed or painted but derived from photographs. In the entire 2-part exhibition 29 out of 44 artists fall into one of these categories. There were also several artists’ choice segments. Part 1 had a section selected by Elizabeth Peyton, which brought historical painters of eastern long island into the show, including Fairfield Porter and William Merritt Chase.

Because of this, Fairfield Porter’s beautiful, muffled portrait of John MacWhinnie inadvertently dominates Part 1. Though not photo-based painter, Porter absorbed the downbeat ambience of the box brownie snapshot, a standard image-maker in the fifties and early sixties. The MacWhinnie portrait looks back to the wan interiors of Vuillard and forward to the painterly photographs of William Eggleston. Peyton, represented by a landscape and a portrait, seems weak in comparison to Porter but Porter may have looked a little underdone at first, too. In fact, Peyton’s work, like Porter’s, reveals itself slowly. It is 2 weeks later as I write this and I can still clearly recall her landscape painting. That is the best test I know. It is made up of few marks, but they are amazingly deft ones. Peyton avoids the ‘Wow’. This may be the only job left for painting: to be unassuming and slowly establish a permanent intimacy.

Jessica Craig-Martin’s tough, intelligent photograph, “Parrish Museum Benefit, Southampton,” (2001) has a charm that belies its large scale, and is a reminder of Porter’s penchant for using just-after-dinner tables laden with flowers as a motif.

On a Saturday evening in July the writer and curator Klaus Kertess interviewed painter Jane Freilicher as part of the lecture series that accompanied the exhibition. She strayed from talking about her own work, (she had a large landscape of a Hampton construction site in Part One) to supply a few choice art historical mini-portraits: “Hans Hofmann was a combination of Santa Claus and Richard Wagner”. The poet and critic Frank O’Hara loved the studios of artists, “He even loved to stretch paintings”. She characterized Fairfield Porter as being “terse”: “He would show up in your studio out of nowhere and not say anything, then make one short comment, like, ‘that’s one of your side-to-side paintings’ and then disappear.”

In Part Two there was an abundance of sensually direct paintings. Worthy works of sculpture and installation were also on display, but what was ultimately striking here was cross-criticism among the paintings.

Billy Sullivan’s “Sirpa Milk,” a painting copied from his own photograph, depicts a nude woman breakfasting on a bed in a hotel room. The painting is predominantly white, but discreet intensities of color provide the image with a subtle structure. Delicate smears of transparent yellow enjoin details, such as the place between the pancake and the plate on the room service tray, the creases in the frame on the wall and the tuck of the towel around the neck of the nude figure. Sullivan’s decorative freedom, so amply present in this work, contrasts with the murky photo-based paintings exhibited by Chuck Close and Eric Fischl. These paintings underline the pitfalls in maintaining the “look” of the photograph to resolve the image.

Jane Wilson’s “Clouded Midnight,” depicting a brooding night sky, reveals, upon close examination, an electric orange underneath the dominant indigo clouds. Mary Heilman installed a polychrome painting with two chairs of her own design, rhyming one color from the painting with a color used in the objects. Heilman’s ensemble hit a note between seriousness and whimsy, casual décor and reductive aesthetics. Another kind of rhyming took place in the painting, “Everything,” by David Salle, where a collection of common objects, such as hats, flowers and fabric, established visual correspondences via similarities in brushstrokes and appearances. The painting was a ruminative essay of complex space, bright color and self-reflexive imagery.

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Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris 120 Park Avenue

Alex Katz: The Woodcuts and Linocuts
Peter Blum 99 Wooster

Alex Katz: Large Paintings
PaceWildenstein 534 West 25th Street

Elizabeth Peyton
Gavin Brown’s Enterprise 436 W 15th St

Thomas Nozkowski
Max Protetch 511 West 22nd Street

James Siena
Gorney Bravin & Lee 534 West 26th Street

After looking at Alex Katz, the world begins to look like a Katz painting. Life imitates art, with good taste for once. A while ago I was at the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, to see Alex Katz: Small Paintings, the show currently bifurcated between the Whitney’s uptown premises and their room at the Philip Morris Building. Back in early summer it was at its originating venue, the Addison Gallery of American Art, at the Phillips. Strolling around the campus of this exclusive prep school, with its fine colonial architecture, the sumptuous brick and white boards against green lawns and blue sky, I was in a WASP idyll. Only a Samuel Barber soundtrack was needed to complete the picture. But post-Katz the scene was soon inflected with New York edge. Bold reductions, cropping, and jazzy juxtapositions suggested themselves. A group of kids was engrossed in a team game of Frisbee. A young black woman among otherwise all-male all-white company particularly shone (or at least drew my attention). Inevitably, she brought to mind His Behind the Back Pass 1978, Katz’s picture of his son Vincent as a latter-day, all-American discus thrower. Frisbee is the perfect Katzian motif, a game at once balletic and robust, flippant (you literally throw it away) and yet Zen-like in its focus. Frisbee demands concentrated skill but must be carried off with suave nonchalance. Something hot done in a cool way.

Right now’s New York is friendly to Katz lovers. Besides the Whitney double-decker, there’s The Woodcuts and Linocuts, organized by Colby College Museum of Art, at the Peter Blum Gallery; there was a gem of a show of early works at Robert Miller; and to counterbalance the small paintings, there’s Big Paintings, a show of new work at PaceWildenstein, at their new Chelsea barn. “Katz” and “Big” have been in danger of becoming synonyms in recent years; thus a focus on small offers a novel glance at this muralist of cool. The small pictures tend to be more painterly, with greater evidence of the brush and the hand behind it. And ultimately, in a way, of the eye behind the hand, too, because if big represents synthesis and resolution, small intimates the perceptual, the initial rapport with the observed world. While the big Katz stretches credibility by doing perverse things with form, the small Katz, quirky in less calculated ways, actually enhances a sense of actuality. The cool and resolved big contrasts with the warm and experimental small. Small is comparatively quick, impatient, impressionistic, it is also more intent on confronting perceptual problems than big, so there is greater involvedness and naturalistic (rather than stylized) awkwardness.

Several images in the Addison’s version of Small Paintings now find themselves in PaceWildenstein’s Big Paintings. These are among the ten portraits that are studies for the monumental ten by twenty foot Ada’s Garden 2000. The proximity of big and small on adjacent walls sheds light on the perceptual-synthetic dualism in Katz. The small studies really glow, almost literally in the way the figures are haloed by pentimenti. The black backgrounds, animatedly brushy at the reduced scale, are evened out into sheer expanses of matt blackness, to complement the lush resolve of opened-out forms. What really happens, of course, between the perceptual small and the synthetic big is that awkwardness is transferred from the artist’s brush to the viewer’s eye. The small Vincent is an unmistakable likeness of his son even at thirty feet; telltale signs like a gentle snarl and jutting of jaw are keenly observed. But writ large, rather than being retained through some caricatural mechanism they are jettisoned in favor of generalization. The individual slinks away into the crowd.

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Decorative flatness and convincing realist space have often dueled before in Alex Katz images, but in Carver’s Corner – to my mind the most audacious painting in his new show – the artist ups the ante. In the right hand scene in this divided composition, the sky and treetops at the top “ground” the image while the flat, green non-space below is an abstraction within which, nonetheless “grounded” and convincingly lit figures are positioned. Somehow, the picture obliges us to submit to its own logic.

Several shows by other artists about town right now [actually all three shows plusBig Paintings ended the day of publication, for which apologies to reader and author alike- Ed.] give one cause to celebrate paintings one can slip into a pocketbook (or at least a backpack). The cynic might say this is a recession market’s “behind the back pass”, tempting tidbits for the Wall Street weary. Three shows are especially deserving of attention, in my opinion, and each says something specific about scale.

Thomas Nozkowski has an uncanny ability to seem utterly preoccupied by form while quietly attending to style. His small paintings contrast, strategically, with Katz’s in a crucial regard. In Katz, one could say that the small works are paintings, the big pictures. By this I mean that while the small emphasize their own making, their matière, the bigger ones are machines, cinematic and transparent. Nozkowski habitually paints small, and professes to have done so from early in his career for political reasons (not wanting to decorate bank lobbies but to make works his peers could afford). But it seems to me there is a more aesthetically interesting reason for his scale, which is where style over form comes into play. All the while that he uses organic shapes, patterns, textures, these relate to observed phenomena in the real world. They may to some extent have been existentially discovered in the painting process, but thanks to their diminutive scale, they have the energy of depiction. In this sense, they are post-abstract. They retain what they want, lexiconically, from the achievements of modernist abstraction, but refer back to an older, (old-masterly) tradition of picture making that predates any sense of “getting lost” in the painting process, in the way described (and exemplified) by Jackson Pollock. The paradox in Nozkowski is that precisely because of their reticence – they can have a held back, cramped, even anal execution sometimes – they are all the more lithe and inventive. Their authenticity arises from being stylistically self-conscious.

There is a similar “authentic despite” quality to Elizabeth Peyton, the Watteau of blah. Katz and Hockney are her most conspicuous contemporary artistic heroes, choices, when they were made a decade or so ago, that were almost poignantly retro in themselves. I mention Watteau because of an insouciant whimsicality underpinned by psychological substance. Another old master she recalls in this respect is Forain. It’s in drawing technique, specifically, that she resembles Hockney, whereas the kinship with Katz mostly has to do with brinkmanship. She constantly bids high in her wagers against naffness. In her case, the traffic between the synthetic and the perceptual runs in the opposite direction from Katz (or Nozkowski). With Peyton, falsity and mediation are the sine qua non alike of source and style: she starts with media images of pop stars and House of Windsor princelings, or with snapshots of downtown boho friends posing so nonchalantly they might as well be minor celebrities. Her painterly style proceeds to flirt rampantly with the fashion plate, as Katz seems to with the billboard and the cartoon. What makes her highly wrought images so tantalizing, in my opinion, is the exquisite correlation between emotional attitude and painterly investment. In Katz, a twist of poignancy gives edge to his high jinks with style. In Peyton, where sloppiness and feyness characterize so perfectly an alienated, narcissistic longing, it’s not a twist but the whole fruit that is thrown in.

My only problem with Peyton’s paintings is that I feel I’m on a perpetual first date. Nice feeling, but will this go anywhere? I’m sorry to keep comparing everyone to Katz but seeing his latest works at PaceWildenstein with a small display of gems from the 1950s a block away, at Robert Miller, really brought home the extraordinary phenomenon of an artist virtually arriving on the scene with a fully formed, internally coherent, personal language which nonetheless had within it phenomenal space for growth, change, challenge. Peyton’s painterly touch is so loaded with emotional implication as to be circumscribed by it as well. When, as recently, she attempts to go bigger she gains little. It is as if her touch is good for intimation only, which is a bit of a tease. Having said that, Paradis (Kirsty) 2001, gives some grounds for hope, with its ethereal opening up of forms amid the breathing space around the brushmarks. But comparison of painted things within the painting is a sad give away of the difference between a master and an acolyte. The tattoo in Ben Drawing 2001 is feeble (unlike Ben’s actual drawing, which is perfect). In Katz, drawn or painted things in the real world – markings on a canoe, lipstick or eye shadow on a face, fabric designs – masterfully accentuate the play of artifice and reality. They also underpin the self-containment of his painted vision, its internal logic: the way painted things are contiguous with his handwriting while seamless with the world. But perhaps such technical issues come down to time as much as talent. Peyton gives us cause for great hope. As Bad Painting goes, she is as good as it gets.

In this feast of small painters, we leave James Siena for dessert (crème brulée, if an awful pun on his name can be forgiven). Entering the private view of his current show at Gorney Bravin & Lee, an artist friend more familiar with his oeuvre exclaimed, “These are murals by James’s standard!” At around 19 by 15 inches, on average, these are apparently a big step up for an artist whose exquisite meditations on the decorative veer towards the microscopic. But none of this should consign his vision to any category of slightness. Evoking such disparate associations (off the top of my head) as African textiles, Gustav Klimt, Adolph Gottlieb’s pictographs, Bridget Riley’s swirls, Moghul miniatures, the nutty visions of Friedensreich Huntertwasser, tantric art, Escher drawings, Aztec architecture, Keith Haring, Yayoi Kusama, and Maori tattoos they absorb energies from these sources without being retro or referential. They are self-contained aesthetic experiences. If in any sense they are depictive then they depict the universe in a grain of sand. Coming at the them for a second visit after looking at Elizabeth Peyton I was struck by an unexpected commonality between her camp smudges of lipstick and the way traces of pink track the blue lines in Siena’s Blue Corner Painting 2001. The DNA of small painting throws up unlikely family connections. How happy under the lens of a Chelsea afternoon to discover such siblings under the skin.

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