Why any self-respecting painter would set out to be quite so feeble has never been obvious, but so many have done so in the last three decades that safety in numbers has long since set in. Feebleness is not so much a coincidence by now as a movement, the success of each artist reinforcing the next. Peyton was among the first, at the forefront of all those American women like Karen Kilimnik and Lisa Yuskavage who have created such a strong market out of deliberate weakness. She is by far the best, or at least the most interesting.
The exhibition of Peyton’s work at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, beautifully installed in galleries the height of a church, the tiny paintings set far apart to emphasize the supposed analogy with icons, includes a couple of really fine works. One is a spry portrait of David Hockney in which the trademark glasses are swimming-pool deep. The other is a version of Delacroix’s formidably hieratic self-portrait in the Louvre, all high collar and prim moustache, which Peyton crops into a sepia close-up thus removing the French painter’s remoteness and edging him closer to photo-real presence.
It is conceptually clever, but more than that it exudes actual feeling; as if this modern painter in cool, hip, Manhattan had some real empathy with the solitary and secretive genius of 19th-century romanticism and had found a way to unlock him.
Still, this is not a very high yield from a 20-year survey. And there are plenty of works here that do not rise to anything as big as an idea, paintings that try out other artists’ styles as if they were fashion accessories. Some are as twee as anything by the girly Karen Kilimnik; others like outright pastiches of the Belgian painter Luc Tuymans.
And in the end, the overall tone is so hard to read that one even begins to doubt the sincerity of her aim. Peyton has often said she cannot paint anyone she does not admire, but the only consistent visual proof of this admiration is the constancy of her attention. It is one thing to be devoted to people, another to be preoccupied by painting.
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