The Artist of the Portrait.(Elizabeth Peyton)(Interview)

My hindsight is as good as yours, but I'm still trying to figure out how Elizabeth Peyton launched her career with an exhibition of idealized figurative portrait drawings of Napoleon Bonaparte; Ludwig II, King of Bavaria; the King of Thailand; Mademoiselle George, Napoleon's mistress; and other worthies of earlier times. No artist in recent memory has sailed into the mainstream with work that seemed so far out of it. My guess is that only about fifty people saw the show, which was presented, in 1993, in a room at the Chelsea Hotel, on West Twenty-third Street--visitors had to ask for the key to Room 828--but notice was taken, pictures were sold, and Peyton, at the age of twenty-seven, was on her way. Since then, her vividly painted, lushly romantic images of rock stars, film idols, and, eventually, fellow-artists and friends have brought her the kind of fervid admiration that non-admirers find inexplicable and annoying. "She's doing something very simple in a very complicated age, and it can easily be misunderstood and trivialized," Gavin Brown, Peyton's dealer, who is also a sort of co-conspirator and goad to the widely diverse band of artists he represents, says. Peyton calls what she's doing "pictures of people," rather than portraits. Whatever they are, the way she does them, with an unembarrassed emphasis on visual pleasure, suggests a shift in current attitudes about art and artmaking.

Now forty-two, and about to have her first important survey exhibition--it opens on October 8th at the New Museum of Contemporary Art--Peyton approaches this milestone with her usual combination of discipline and insouciance. Mid-career retrospectives can invite critical backlashes, but Peyton appears unworried. "I feel like I have a lot to give, so I might be disappointed if it's not noticed," she told me recently. "But I've made these pictures, and I feel great about them." This kind of quiet confidence is characteristic of Peyton. She is on good terms with her work, herself, and her life, and apparently has been since the summer of 1990, when she discovered her direction as an artist.

"That was a really bad summer," she reflected, with a self-mocking grimace. We were sitting in the third-floor studio of her small nineteenth-century house in the West Village, which she bought two years ago. Peyton is slim, poised, and direct. Her clothes are understated but carefully chosen--Marc Jacobs, whom she has painted, is her favorite designer. Her dark hair is cut very short, gamine style. She smiles often, and looks you right in the eye when she speaks. "I'd graduated from the School of Visual Arts a few years earlier," she continued, "and I was living with my ex-boyfriend in a tiny apartment on the Lower East Side. Earlier that summer, I'd lost my job, as an assistant to Ronald Jones, a teacher at S.V.A. I didn't have any money, and I was so ashamed of myself for not having a job. All I did was read. I read a book on Napoleon, by Vincent Cronin, and a book by Stefan Zweig on Marie Antoinette. I read Stendahl's 'The Charterhouse of Parma' and 'The Red and the Black.' Even though I was miserable, I was eating up every word in those books. And somehow I came out of this knowing what I wanted to do."

Her deliverance began with a charcoal drawing of Napoleon as a fine-featured young first lieutenant, his longish hair parted in the middle. (The image was suggested by the Antoine-Jean Gros portrait on her copy of Cronin's biography.) Three years earlier, when she was still in art school, she had made some drawings of Ludwig II of Bavaria, known as the Mad King, an eccentric aesthete and a patron of Richard Wagner's; he was deposed in 1886 and died two days later, under mysterious circumstances. She did several more Ludwig pictures in 1991, including a fairly large full-length painting on glass. She also made a drawing of Princess Elizabeth at the age of sixteen (after a photograph by Cecil Beaton), and several more drawings of Napoleon. "For the first time, I realized that there was something very important about portraiture," she said. "Reading about Napoleon made me think how people make history. They are the way the world moves, and they contain their time. It shows in their faces. I'd always made pictures of people, even when I was a little, little person. The urge was there--I just didn't know why. When I did that first drawing of Napoleon, I realized this is something I have to do and want to ...