‘‘That’s what it’s all about – making art is making something live forever […] a way of holding onto things and making things go on through time.’’
—Elizabeth Peyton

Stunningly executed in luminous, jewel-like shades of deep reds, pinks, and rich tones of black and blue, Torino (Tony) Sept. 99 is an arresting early example of American artist Elizabeth Peyton’s unique contribution to contemporary portraiture. Taking as its subject Peyton’s lover and fellow artist Tony Just, the work exemplifies Peyton’s sensitive and emotionally charged approach to her material, typically revolving around the representation of close friends and familiar cultural icons borrowed from second-hand images. Fascinated by the fragile beauty of youth, Peyton’s tender and often small-scaled images of artists and musicians are among her best known and revered works, records not only of specific individuals and the cultural moment that they occupy but, more pressingly, of the profound emotional response that they draw from her; as the artist has explained, ‘I’m very inspired by artists and musicians, people who touch me, people who help me feel my feelings.'ⁱ

Portraits and Polaroids

 

Including notable historical characters, rock stars, and members of the Royal Family, Peyton has drawn on a wide array of visual sources including magazine clippings and press photographs in the composition of her portraits of well-known cultural figures. Often familiar, these images elicit a charge of recognition in the viewer, drawing out our own feelings towards her subjects. In her more intimate portraits of friends and family from her inner circle – of which the present work is a particularly powerful example – Peyton offers us a more personal vision, an invitation to engage directly with the artist on her own emotional frequency. Instead of second-hand and widely circulated press images, for these more intimate portraits Peyton draws on her own photographs, informal snapshots on 35 millimetre, polaroid, and digital cameras amassed over decades. In recent years, this aspect of Peyton’s practice has received increasing critical attention, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum even mounting an exhibition devoted to this vast archive of images in the 2008 exhibition Elizabeth Peyton: Portrait of an Artist. Drawing attention to this important dimension of Peyton’s practice, Torino (Tony) Sept. 99 belongs to a fascinating lineage of artists documenting the lives and loves of their innermost circle including Alfred Stieglitz, Lee Miller, and Robert Mapplethorpe. Peyton’s painted portraits of Just carry an emotional charge and are especially reminiscent of Stieglitz’s images of his partner and fellow artist Georgia O’Keeffe.

 

Following their first meeting at a party in the 1990s, Peyton immediately started drawing and painting Just in a variety of poses and settings. As she would describe later ‘It really felt like I’d waited my entire life to meet Tony. He was magnetic. I wanted to look at him all the time.^’ii Peyton has recalled how Just initially reminded her of a young Napoleon – a favourite subject of her early painting - the two even travelling to France shortly after meeting to visit Fontainebleau where Napoleon had based himself before his ultimate exile in 1814. Photographs taken of Just on this trip would go on to form the basis of a series of portraits from the late 1990s and early 2000s, underscoring the centrality of these works in what would prove to be a pivotal period in Peyton’s career and personal life. Following her first institutional solo show in 1997 at the St. Louis Art Museum, Peyton was the subject of a staggering thirteen monographic exhibitions between 1998 and 2000, a remarkable record of the critical reception of her work in these early decades of her practice. Appearing here with delicate, elfin features, tousled hair, and an air of androgynous self-determination, ‘Torino’ epitomises the otherworldly sharp beauty that characterises Peyton’s most accomplished portraits. Although stylistically and emotionally distinct, in the rich palette, confident self-assured pose, and narrative charge of Torino (Tony) Sept. 99, Peyton seems to be drawing certain visual relationships to Otto Dix’s infamous 1926 portrait of androgynous beauty, Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden. This work similarly captured not only the mood of an epoch, but a new fascination with psychological interiority that resonates with the profound emotional character of Peyton’s most powerful portraits.

 

 

Collector’s Digest 

 

• Debuting her career in Room 828 of the infamous Chelsea Hotel in New York and then mounting works at the Prince Albert pub in London in 1995, Elizabeth Peyton has since realised solo exhibitions at major public institutions including The Royal Academy in London; The Walker Centre, Minneapolis; and The National Portrait Gallery, London, amongst others. 
• Featuring fellow artist and lover Tony Just, Torino (Tony) Sept. 99 is one of several portraits of the same sitter produced by Peyton during this period.  

 

 

ⁱ Elizabeth Peyton, quoted in ‘I paint people who help me feel my feelings’, Conceptual Fine Arts, 19 December 2016, online. 
ⁱⁱ Elizabeth Peyton, quoted in Steve Lafreniere, ‘A Conversation with the Artist’ in Matthew Higgs, et. al., Elizabeth Peyton, New York, 2005, p. 252.