Tag Archives: Elizabeth Peyton

Portraiture: the ignored step-sister of Contemporary Art

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The Old Masters all did portraits in oils as their bread and butter, but that isn’t the case with the big names in art today. Damien Hirst is immersed in formaldehyde, and the majority of great talents are swirling in the shapes of abstraction. Who is painting portraits today? By portrait, I mean the old-fashioned, limited definition that focuses on a human subject and depicts their likeness in oils on a canvas with a degree of verisimilitude.

The real question is, does anyone do that anymore? The photograph is many way has taken over the simpler aspect of portraiture, that is, to record a person’s appearance. I was struck by the amount of portraits in the Met’s exhibition Art and Love in the Renaissance Italy, and by how few I had seen by contemporary artists. That’s not to say portraiture is a dead art, but it is hardly a genre that gets a large amount of attention.

There are a few artists of note, however:

Closest to Tradition
Elizabeth Peyton does small, intimate portraits of friends and cultural icons much as the Old Masters would have, that is, with an eye to documenting what the person looks like. She focuses on portraiture, a rarity these days. A successful and well known artist, she is the only one whose oeuvre consists mainly of portraits.


Figurative Painters of Erotic Tendencies
John Currin is well-known for his figurative paintings, albeit of a more erotic nature. Yet he documents people less and less as stylization’s based on cartoons and old masters like Lucas Cranach, and more like individuals. For example, see this portriat of Rachel Feinstein, his wife.

Lucien Freud‘s work tends to be less camp and more fleshy, but he too is known for his figurative paintings. Here we have a self-portrait on the left. This works is a portraits in the sense that it represents him, but most of his figures are anonymous pieces of flesh. Certainly, Freud is a capable portrait artist though.

Like a photograph, but not
Chuck Close made his reputation on photorealism and figurative painting. While it’s true the style below in this self-portrait is not one Rembrandt would have used, it doesn’t comprimise the viewer’s impression of what he looks like. His very large productions that recreate the pixellated effect of prints and photographs while focusing on a realistic face.

A dying style?
Obviously this is not an exhaustive survey of contemporary art. Please tell me if I’m missing something big.

Portraiture of the old style seems to be out of style. Take a look at Art Net’s 300 most searched artists and try to find another living artist on the list who does portraits. That’s not to say there are no longer artists for hire, should you want to commission a traditional portrait. It’s just that the people on this list aren’t on the top 300 of Art Nets.
I would have argued that interest in the individual was perinneal, but perhaps I’m wrong. Has traditional portraiture become irrelevant?

Portraitist Elizabeth Peyton is no Warhol (and not as fun as C.L.U.E. either)

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The New Museum of Contemporary Art of Bowery is hosting Live Forever, works by portraitist Elizabeth Peyton, and so I took my excited little butt there last night, after a long day of work. (Not coincidentally, the New Museum is free on Thursdays from 7 to 10 p.m.)

I had only seen Peyton’s images online, but thought they used color well and that it was exciting to see something as traditional as figurative portraiture make a splash on the contemporary art scene. Peyton paints friends and also cultural icons in her remarkably cohesive oeuvre. As it was her paintings of Kurt Cobain, lead singer of grunge band Nirvana who committed suicide in the 90s, that brought Peyton into the limelight, I thought I would be encountering something Warhol-esque, where the confluence of the individual and pop culture become huge statements about our cultural identity.
My expectations were confounded. Peyton perhaps gives us an intimate glance into her interior world, but I wouldn’t even go so far as to say she’s making a statement about herself. And yet, she manages to say nothing about the people she portrays at the same time. Remarkable.

Peyton’s works are small and intimate, consequently seeming overwhelmed by the whiteness of the New Museum’s gallery space, and painterly in a broad way. Miniatures are often exquisitely detailed, but these approximately 10″ x 12″ works were broadly sketched out like watercolors. They were unlike traditional portraiture in that, instead of taking the subject in a formal pose, these were composed like Polaroids as if the subjects were caught unawares at extreme angles. They were well-painted and pleasant. Unfortunately, I can’t say much more in their favor.

While Peyton is a figurative portraitist, she does have a distinctive style that colonizes her subjects as her own. All her subjects become triangular faces with bright red mouths and slanty eyes, and she seems to prefer fey males. The works are stylized enough to be distinctly hers, and are more revealing of her than the subject. Perhaps that itself is the difference between her work and traditional portraiture.

Seeing her oeuvre at once, I had the idea of that this was her interior world in which the works were snapshots of memory.Peyton’s style does not seem to have evolved–any of the portraits could have been painted at any point in her career. Overall, it was a little…boring.

However, I insist you stop the New Museum anyhow, for a very small and very fun installation. Wedged into the interior staircase between the third and fourth floors, an installation called “C.L.U.E.” will entertain you better than clowns and acrobats at the big top. According to its press release, “C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience) is a collaboration between artists A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds (Layla Childs and Sonya Robbins), AJ Blandford, and Kinski. Like a living organism, C.L.U.E. adapts to the space it temporarily occupies. In this manifestation at the New Museum, it takes the form of site-specific performance, multichannel video installation, and video projection.”

What does that mean? It means that, once you put on the headphones, you can’t help but bob your head in time as the matching pair of girls do funny dances across parking lots, deserts and redwood forests, all via projector through the window onto the building across the way. A blast.