Elizabeth Peyton - 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session New York Wednesday, November 16, 2022 | Phillips

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • "I really love the people I paint. I believe in them."
    —Elizabeth Peyton

    Elizabeth Peyton refers to her work as “pictures of people” rather than portraits. This humble tone reflects the artist’s casually brilliant style of intimate, straightforward paintings of friends and cultural figures. Burkhard Riemschneider, 1995, depicts the eponymous gallerist who, with Tim Neuger, opened the gallery Neugerriemschneider in Berlin just the year prior. Riemschneider began representing Peyton the year this work was created, and his expressive likeness responds to the close relationship between two young people who had begun to achieve early professional success in the field.

    "Each image is a point on entwined strands of artistic or emotional growth, memorializing a relationship, acknowledging an inspiration or exposing an aspect of ambition."
    —Roberta Smith

    Riemschneider ’s delicate features and cool androgyny capture the cultural zeitgeist of the 1990s. The cropped composition further reflects the aesthetics of the decade’s youth culture, drawing influence from the close-up photographs featured in magazines like Cream. Mirroring this style, Peyton painted her sitter from a snapshot, isolating his face from any distinct background. The lush, rosy backdrop heightens Riemschneider’s glowing ruby lips and attenuated pale skin. As is exemplary of Peyton’s work, the male subject also embodies a graceful femininity. In the word of Peyton, “There’s something about a particular kind of male sexuality that has always appealed to me: straight boys who aren’t afraid of being feminine, who aren’t afraid to be very open about the whole thing.”i

     

    Édouard Manet, Plum Brandy, about 1877, oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1971.85.1. Image courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
    Édouard Manet, Plum Brandy, c. 1877, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Image: National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1971.85.1

    Burkhard Riemschneider is an important example amongst several paintings Peyton made of art world figures– other subjects have included Matthew Barney, Gavin Brown and her former husband Rirkrit Tiravanija. As identified by Nadia Tscherny, these subjects form for Peyton “a highly personal canon of celebrity,” spanning personal friends and cultural figures.ii Her early career depictions of Marc Jacobs, Queen Elizabeth and musicians Kurt Cobain, Liam Gallagher and Sid Vicious distinctly capture the 1990s; curator Laura Hoptman has recognized Peyton as her generation’s “painter of modern life,” a distinction referencing Charles Baudelaire’s term to describe Édouard Manet in the late nineteenth century. Through her tender portraits and curated cast of era-defining subjects, Peyton can be understood as a fin de siècle painter for the 20th century, walking in the footsteps of such masters as Manet. Their respective cultural observation and mastery of portraiture evident in comparison with works like Plum Brandy, circa 1877.

    "Even though you may not know who anyone is, each portrait is a superstar... In the people she paints Elizabeth sees the special qualities as light, their vitality and accomplishments illuminating their bodies, and extra brightness in their form, deities in aggregates of color, gods almost transparent in shimmering light, their nature displayed in translucent radiance."
    —John Giorno

    The present example further exhibits Peyton’s genius as a colorist. Painted with diluted oil paint and finished with a varnished, glossy surface, the work’s subject glows with a seeming effortlessness against a backdrop awash in peach and coral. With this brilliance packed into such an intimate scale, it is no wonder her work so often elicits the description “jewel-like,” as expressed by curators Laura Hoptman, who organized Peyton’s mid-career retrospective at the New Museum in New York in 2008, and Chrissie Iles, who selected Peyton for the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Roberta Smith has likewise used the phrase, further praising the works’ “incandescent glow” and “offhand intensity.”iii

     

    Collector’s Digest

     

    • Since her first exhibitions in a South London pub in 1992 and at the Chelsea Hotel in 1993, Peyton has had major retrospectives at the New Museum, New York, Royal Academy, London, and The National Portrait Gallery, London, as well as numerous international exhibitions which have secured her reputation of one of the most important figurative artists working today.


    • The Museum of Modern Art in New York holds 32 of Elizabeth Peyton’s works within its permanent collection.


    • Most recently, Peyton has channeled her sense of the mutual reciprocity existing between art forms and artists with a dazzling poster design for Luca Guadagnino's transcendent new film Bones and All, screened at the Venice film festival in September 2022.


    i Elizabeth Peyton quoted in Calvin Tomkins, “The Artist of the Portrait,” The New Yorker, October 6, 2008, online
    ii Nadia Tscherny, “Beautiful People,” Art in America, February 23, 2009, online
    iii Roberta Smith, “Blood and Punk Royalty to Grunge Royalty,” The New York Times, March 24, 1995, section C, p. 30 and online

    • Provenance

      Galleria il Capricorno, Venice
      Private Collection (acquired from the above in 1996)
      Christie's, London, October 18, 2013, lot 55
      Private Collection
      Acquired from the above by the present owner

    • Exhibited

      Venice, Galleria il Capricorno, Elizabeth Peyton, 1996
      Seoul, Jason Haam, Faces: From Warhol to Chun Kyung-ja, June 7–July 31, 2018

Property from a Prominent Contemporary Collection

Ο◆319

Burkhard Riemschneider

signed, titled and dated "BURKHARD RIEMSCHNEIDER Elizabeth Peyton 1995" on the reverse
oil on board
17 1/8 x 14 1/8 in. (43.5 x 35.9 cm)
Painted in 1995.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$450,000 - 650,000 

Sold for $567,000

Contact Specialist

Patrizia Koenig
Specialist, Head of Day Sale, Afternoon Session
+1 212 940 1279
pkoenig@phillips.com

20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session

New York Auction 16 November 2022