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The National Portrait Gallery’s mini-retrospective of New York painter Elizabeth Peyton offers a heart-swelling, eye-pleasing parade of exquisite faces, from the gifted and famous to the merely really good-looking.
Peyton rose to fame in the 1990s for painting beautiful boys – from friends to pop stars – and has been stereotyped and belittled for it since. But I love these works for their freshness, vivid colour and immediacy. Peyton gives us unabashed, rapturous admiration and desire. She takes the priapic male screen idol or rock god and melts his symbolic phallus in the heat of the female gaze, in intense paintings small enough to hold. In Peyton’s world of female looking and longing, men are dream figures as ethereal and alluring as unicorns, more beautiful than life. Not all men, obviously.
Parts of the exhibition are scattered upstairs in the Tudor and Victorian galleries, so after some trudging one finds, next to a 16th-century portrait of Lord Burghley, a startling image of Liam Gallagher from 1996. His skin is bleached white, his lips ruby red, eyes a piercing blue. It’s the hot vampire version, basically, and Keith Richards, Jarvis Cocker and Richard Ashcroft get the same treatment in portraits ranging from 1996 to 2004. The Darnley portrait of Elizabeth I gets very fair company from a Peyton work called Alizarin Kurt, in which Kurt Cobain is a wedge of pallid cheek and sharp jaw, the rest of his face hidden under a plume of sweeping orange hair. His lips are painted the same shade. There is a Heathcliff-like sepia portrait of Delacroix and a tender charcoal of Napoleon – as if Napoleon and Delacroix were both hot 20-year-olds who played in bands in the 1990s.
Peyton has a glorious way with colour and these portraits capture men at the peak of their beauty and the height of fame, in the glare of the spotlight, the flare of the lens or the woozy light of the morning after. Her paintings reflect a deep grounding in film, theatre, fine art photography and art history, not just pop culture. 2003’s Live to Ride (E.P.) is a gorgeously realised still in which a drowsy, very young Peyton in a red T-shirt leans on a patterned cushion, looking into the afternoon light. In 2003’s Nick (A Luncheonette December 2002) another beautiful loner stares in bashful torment, the khaki of his parka hood toning perfectly with the rainy blues of the city night.
Sometimes Peyton’s influences are richer than the paintings they inspire, and sometimes her figures appear to be bored rather than heavy with longing. Yet she is thematically consistent and her ideas are rigorous. A series of large, unfinished-looking paintings are inspired by the operas Manon Lescaut, Parsifal and Lohengrin. They depict nurturing, yearning, vulnerable men, and scenes of mutual, heightened romance between couples. Vår, from 2013, is a very sexy monochrome piece, delicate and dynamic, of an embracing couple, their faces concealed.
The toggling between vapidity and sophistication, bland copying and intent focus, is nowhere more apparent than in two further self-portraits from 2011 and 2016. I thought the earlier one was a copied snap of a fashion model, with its elegant colours and a face that reveals nothing. Contrast that with the painting from 2016 – the only substantial work in the post-2013 period. Portrait at the Opera (Elizabeth) looks like Titanic-era (of course) Leonardo DiCaprio. The artist is androgynous, challenging and powerful, her eyes exuding, absorbing and observing the voltage of desire and image-making around her.
The aggravating spacing out of works up and down the floors might make visitors give up before seeing the best work in the exhibition. This is in room 24, it’s called Twilight and it’s a tiny oil from 2009. In full, wintry, dreamy colour, gorgeously swept on to the canvas, an adolescent boy and girl stare at each other in rapture. It’s a still from the atmospheric forest scene in director Catherine Hardwicke’s adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s first novel: a story fixed around a girl’s desire, now filtered through the creations of three female artists in literature, film and painting.
Indeed, Peyton excels at representing living female artists. A 2010 portrait of Isa Genzken from a 1980 photograph is full of personality and movement. Her eyes burn with intention, her expression is mistrusting and impatient, her hair ruffled like a woman on the go. The same goes for a small 2015 portrait of designer Phoebe Philo, which zings with sharp charisma.
Undeniably seductive though it is, the show reminded me of a 90s fashion shoot: everyone is white and no one smiles. Out of dozens of faces depicted in full colour with a rapturous eye, there is an indifferent, tiny scratching of rapper Tyler the Creator and a little brown oil portrait of Frida Kahlo. She is topless.
From 2013 onwards, the flushed colour and lush solidity bleed out of Peyton’s works and the images balloon, waver and disintegrate. They look unfinished. Even the opera-inspired couples series are merely sketched in paint, with airy incompleteness. A watercolour of David Bowie from 2017 works, with joyful swoops of almost neon colour. But in a 2016 portrait of Dan Kjaer Nielson, the piercing eyes and pursed mouth contrast with a crudely daubed shirt and trousers. Beautiful boy Timothée Chalamet appears in a 2018 rendering of the postcoital scene from Call Me By Your Name, his face lost under dark, dappled purples. Pastel sketches of Sergei Polunin, Pierre Casiraghi and Peyton’s friend Elias are pretty, but look like a gifted teenager’s doodles.
We must all grow up in the end. In the fabulous, much-missed 90s days of fashion mavens and style magazines, we used to say it was “all about the moment”. That moment has now passed and Peyton’s mature period is yet to cohere. I have long been a Peyton fan and would love to see more of her powerful images of her female peers. Either way, on the basis of this delicate, heady and beautiful show, her admirers still have much to look forward to.
• Elizabeth Peyton: Aire and Angels is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, until 5 January 2020
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