Politics

At the Whitney Museum, Elizabeth Peyton’s ‘Barack and Michelle’ captures the intimacy of the Obamas’ historic inaugural dance


Can you love a painting if you don’t love its subject? What if you love the subject, but don’t think it’s especially well-painted?

Idle questions, but Elizabeth Peyton, whose work I love, makes me wonder about them, and about the sometimes slender line between good art and bad.

Peyton paints rock stars, actors, politicians and royalty, most often from photographs or previously existing images. Some of her subjects are figures from history. Others are people she knows.

She might paint Kanye West, Keith Richards, Angela Merkel or Napoleon. But she never paints them grandly, as impregnable icons riding the walls of the National Portrait Gallery or blazing out of an Andy Warhol screen print. She paints them with a nervous and sensuous touch, up close, porous and adhesive, magnets to private feeling, no longer insulated by power or reputation.

“Barack and Michelle” — a gift to the Whitney Museum of American Art by Beth Swofford, a motion picture agent with Creative Artists Agency — is based on a photograph of the Obamas on the night of his 2008 presidential inauguration. The couple were dancing to Beyoncé’s rendition of “At Last” — a historic and, for many, intensely moving occasion.

Peyton is a bit of an art world celebrity herself, so you sense that she is comfortable in glamorous circles. But her work treads a fine line. Even as she paints her subjects as if they were close acquaintances, her actual images are heavily mediated — based on photos, boosted in our minds by the borrowed charge of vast fame.

So rather than actual intimacy, you are usually looking at a dreamy projection, as if Peyton were a teenage girl with posters of, say, a young Leonardo di Caprio in her bedroom. This ambivalence becomes part of the delicate atmosphere that settles on her work like morning mist.

“Barack and Michelle” is painted with a loose, relaxed touch that is hypersensitive to tonal gradations. The result is not particularly “painterly” — it evokes instead the unique, inky contingency of monotypes. It’s a style at odds, in any case, with the massive global media event it depicts.

This movement back and forth between public and private is at the heart of Peyton’s sensibility. When I contacted Swofford to ask how she feels about the painting, having lived with it, she told me she gave it to the Whitney while Obama was still in office. It appeared shortly afterward in “America Is Hard to See,” the inaugural show in the Whitney’s downtown location in 2015.

Swofford, who is friends with Peyton, said she loved the way the artist “captured the real emotion between” the Obamas on that night, which she (an admirer) remembered as “a moment of real joy, but earned joy. It was hard fought.” Even though the painting captures history, she added, “you can also just experience it as a beautiful painting, an intimate moment between a couple in love. Personal, not political.”

Peyton likes her subjects; that’s obvious. But I don’t think she’s concerned with how you feel about their accomplishments, morals, or reputations. Her concern is to paint them on a small, accessible scale, with sincerity and skill, but also a playful self-awareness about what she is doing. That includes an implied recognition that there may not be a tremendous or immediately obvious difference between her painting and something being sold in a flea market on the Sunset Strip.

I don’t think that worries her. What she conveys instead is that beneath the celebrity, the power, the charisma — beneath even the illusion that we know public figures and in some sense feel we own them, even when the cameras are flashing and their images are being beamed live around the whole world — people remain what they are: fragile, tender, fraying, intense.

Sebastian Smee is a Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic at The Washington Post and the author of “The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals and Breakthroughs in Modern Art.” He has worked at the Boston Globe, and in London and Sydney for the Daily Telegraph (U.K.), the Guardian, the Spectator, and the Sydney Morning Herald.



Source link

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *