Peyton Place

Even though it has been in its fancy new building for nearly a year, I recently went to the New Museum of Contemporary Art for the first time since it re-opened. The building has some high points and some “meh” points. Most strikingly, the elevators are very high-tech and painted in a vibrant green, which is very cool, even though it makes everyone look a little sickly. The galleries themselves are nothing to write home about (but in that they spent nearly $100 million on the building of a New York museum, the fact that the galleries are sub-par actually is worth mentioning). I can’t tell if the design includes adjustable fluorescent lighting, but the hum of the overheads distracted me while I was looking at the art. The gallery rooms are pretty small in general. I suppose that could have been used to the rooms’ advantage, creating intimacy, but the soaring ceilings negated any headway to be made on that front.

Whatever the building left to be desired, the art satisfied. The premiere show at the moment is a two-floor, mid-career retrospective of one of my favorite contemporary artists, Elizabeth Peyton. Peyton is the heir apparent of the great Los Angeles portraitist, David Hockney. Like Hockney, Peyton’s works are vibrant, sumptuous, and deliver an ethos of the subjects that is at times light-hearted and at times darkly brooding. Although she is a young artist, her work is endlessly engaging, and her talent is so immense, her background so well informed, and her skill so cultivated that one can't consider her beautiful oils without recalling masters from Raphael to Renoir. I don't mean to overstate things, but let's just say that I am fan.

I could write a tome on Peyton’s paintings, but for just a little catharsis, I only want to talk about the intimacy of her paintings. In dimension, they rarely exceed about 18 inches, making them a thoroughly engaging scale for the viewer, and most of the scenes she depicts are from a viewpoint of about one to four feet…very intimate portraiture. Her style is at once painterly in broad strokes of rich color, and delicately linear in representing the refined features of her young, often androgynous, models. Her subjects frequently are in vulnerable, quotidian situations, sometimes asleep, sometimes eating out of a take-out tin, sometimes sightseeing abroad. Still others are taken from tabloids and historic or archival photographs, especially of royalty, rock stars, and early feminists. No matter the individual, whether one of her lovers or Elizabeth Arden, the paintings have a spontaneous quality that can be breathtaking and elicit a range of emotions. If you have the chance to see this show, I highly recommend it.

On a personal note, the title painting of this show, Live Forever, was the anchor image for the advertising campaign during the 2004 Whitney Biennial, for which I had a marketing role beyond my years. I worked with Ms. Peyton for a short time in ironing out the details for the Museum’s use of the image, and our interactions were extremely enjoyable. I cannot be happier for her in seeing the first American presentation of a survey of her work. The show is lovely, as is she.