Elizabeth Peyton splices a new-wave view of the world to a delicate, dreamy style. She wears modern designers, appropriating them with the tender enthusiasm of a keen admirer. Similarly, her portraits are love letters to the subjects she paints. Her work captures the “brightness and brevity” of youth, noted the Whitechapel Gallery in its writeup for Peyton’s first retrospective, Live Forever, which traveled the world in 2008.
Peyton is among the few painters who have managed to connect the digital generation with the elegance of figurative art in a way that’s stylish and interesting. In part it’s because of the people she paints, including cult musicians such as Kurt Cobain and Jarvis Cocker and alternative poets such as John Giorno; she has also made art of such post-cultural moments as Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer hugging in a scene from Martin Scorsese’s film, The Age of Innocence. Known for painting her friends, she said in The New Yorker: “I really love the people I paint. . . . I’m happy they’re in the world.”
Getty Images: Michael Loccisano
Elizabeth Peyton at the New Museum Spring Gala, New York City, April 2018.
I am interested in all the decisions that make you decide what to wear. I like the meeting between the designer and the buyer. It is a kind of imagining the possibility of how life could be and also makes everything look better. It is a way of self—expressing how you feel. In relation to art, what I feel right now, not for ever.
—Elizabeth Peyton, Alain Elkann Interviews online, 2014
Born in Connecticut in 1965, now based in Berlin and New York, Peyton was immediately adopted by the fashion crowd. Her work captures the current zeitgeist and aesthetic drift, and the clothes she wears are equally revealing of twenty-first-century cool: unpredictable but spot-on. Peyton’s favorite shoes are Chanel pumps, “A pair of black suede lace-ups with gold piping. They’re the simplest, simplest thing,” she said in a 2003 interview in The Gentlewoman. As a younger woman, she wore her hair cropped and elfin; in a recent shoot by Inez and Vinoodh, it’s higher, quiffed, and worn with a leather jacket. New York Times critic Ken Johnson claims that “she moves in a small, exceedingly privileged, bohemian circle”; however, her wardrobe isn’t full of overt labels. Like her work, it’s all about things she’s found to love, whether dressing up in Dries van Noten or down in faded jeans and cardigans.
Peyton has a great love for European monarchs. Tattooed on her arm is a Napoleonic eagle she copied from a piece of stationery found in a hotel in Fontainebleau.
As a child, Peyton learned to draw with her left hand because she was born with only a thumb and forefinger on her right.
The fluid modernity of Peyton’s subjects sits well with fashion and its love of reconfiguring past-tense influences. Marc Jacobs and Sofia Coppola are both huge fans, and Peyton’s work delves into the retro “Virgin Suicides” aesthetic created by Coppola, which both the artist and Jacobs love. Jacobs has celebrated his admiration by producing a Peyton sweatshirt in his 2013 resort collection—it features her portrait of himself as a young man—and also by collecting her work. She in turn has painted him numerous times. Their adoration is mutual and public, and Peyton said in 2008 that she thinks of him as a kindred spirit: “All that pain that Marc goes through always brings him so much farther in terms of his ability to create. He’s very much like an artist.” Conversely, it’s been said that the incandescent loveliness of her line mirrors the look of fashion illustration.
Her friendship with Belgian designer Dries van Noten is also creatively fruitful. She wears his clothes, saying they “feel full of references and honesty,” and has painted the designer, too. In 2017, he explained how Peyton’s 2001 portrait of Al Gore, Democrats Are More Beautiful, was “the starting point” for his men’s collection of spring/summer 2009, its influence seen “in the fine candy stripe in the shirting and the fresh varsity-style conservatism.” When van Noten was presented with the Couture Council Award for Artistry of Fashion in 2008, she sat by his side at Cipriani, a new best friend.
What Peyton chooses to paint is as carefully curated as her wardrobe. She began her career by exhibiting a series of portraits of historical figures, including Napoleon and Ludwig II, at the Chelsea Hotel in 1993. The art world found this choice hard to understand, as the personalities seemed so archaically irrelevant, but it meshed with what was going on in fashion at the time—which was all about the outsider and the ironically unfashionable. She painted the subjects in a way that made them look like members of a Brit-pop band: slim, otherworldly, and slightly effeminate. At that moment in post-grunge time, style magazines were full of skinny boys and girls in heroin-chic mode. As Calvin Tomkins pointed out in The New Yorker in 2006, “The androgyny in her early work was in tune with the culture it came out of—all those rail-thin boy rockers wearing eye shadow and skintight clothes had their counterparts in the art world’s transgender performance artists.”
Peyton’s current look is neutral and understated: black outfits are the norm, although for a big night out, she makes a statement. At the 2018 New Museum gala at Cipriani in New York, she wore an orange satin evening dress and a glam-rockish long-haired fur gilet. A 2016 exhibition titled Speed, Power, Time, and Heart (named after the buttons on a treadmill) includes a new work of David Bowie drawn from YouTube videos she watched of the music star after his death. It’s not surprising that she should be so moved by a man who deciphered pop culture and harnessed it in cutting-edge ways; in both her art and her clothes, Peyton also reimagines the world around her.
Getty Images: Gabriela Maj
Elizabeth Peyton at the preview of her exhibit Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton at the New Museum, New York City, October 2008.