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Elizabeth Peyton at Guild Hall
Art in America, Jan, 2007 by Faye Hirsch
Elizabeth Peyton's Marc (2003), an etching with aquatint that the artist made at Two Palms Press in New York, with which she has been collaborating for the past four years, is a full-face portrait of a young man (the designer Marc Jacobs) with a cigarette dangling between his lips. A spectrum of black tones coaxes forth a wide range of features, from the pale trace of a cheek to the bank of midnight bangs tumbling over one eye. The surface of pink silk-laminated paper enhances the feeling of sensuous androgyny that is often at play in Peyton's images--both paintings and prints--of friends and celebrities.
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Marc was one of more than 40 works on view at Guild Hall in a recent exhibition, the artist's first large show of her many prints, mainly monotypes with hand painting but also some lithographs, ukiyo-e woodcuts and etchings. Two large, painterly etchings with aquatint, Georgia (after Stieglitz, 1918) and Em (depicting Eminem), resemble Marc in their penumbral luxury, but Peyton is also capable of a brittle, linear expressivity, as witnessed in a number of smaller black-and-white hard-ground portraits, the most telling of which--given that these particular works so readily bring Hockney's graphics to mind--is David Hockney (from the Cover of "That's the Way I See It"), 2002.
Manifestly handcrafted, with a spot-on ability to transmit or invent through gesture an inner life for her subjects, Peyton's work is reminiscent of Andy Warhors in its knack for capturing the paradoxes of celebrity--the enigma at the heart of apparent accessibility. Even when you have no idea whom she is representing, all of Peyton's people look famous, but also as if the artist knows them personally. (Her celebrities are mostly done from media photos.) Cool and remote, they manifest the sort of charismatic self-absorption that seems inexorably to draw desire to itself. The paradox lends itself especially well to monotype, with its extravagant gestures placed, because of the intervening matrix, at something of a remove. Here Peyton can indulge her penchant for rich colors and gay patterns, as in Andre Hat (2004), a depiction of rap singer/dandy Andre 3000 wearing a blue-and-white striped shirt and jaunty fedora, or several versions of the rock singer Julian Casablancas of The Strokes, who roasts in an inferno of reds and oranges.
By luck or forethought, a substantial show of photographs, prints and drawings by Warhol was simultaneously on view at Guild Hall. One of Peyton's monotypes, Andy's Boots (After Avedon), 2002, happens to be an homage to her precursor. Fortuitous for the purpose of comparison was the inclusion of a group of Warhol's "Screen Tests" (1964-66), in which sitters such as Edie Sedgwick and Susan Sontag have the camera trained steadily on them for what seems an eternity. This fixed and fixated camera gaze, under which the subjects begin to fidget and twitch, coming into spasmodic life, provided an interesting corollary to and distinction from Peyton. Her own fixation, by contrast, is conveyed through her animating touch, sweeter than Warhors caustic lens, and infinitely more guileless.
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