Two Views of Georgia O’Keeffe

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The New York Sun

Mounting simultaneous shows of portraits by Elizabeth Peyton and Andy Warhol has the congruity of a perfect rhyme. It’s so obvious, simple, and elegant a pairing, it’s surprising it has not been done before.

Actually, the shows on view now at Guild Hall in East Hampton contain Warhol portraits in a number of media, and prints by Ms. Peyton. But, of her 40-odd etchings, monotypes, lithographs, and woodcuts, only one, as I recall, is not a portrait.

Connoisseurs of surfaces, the two artists are, on the surface, tremendously similar. Swivel your head between the two shows, and you’ll see a lot of celebrity portraiture, a genre for which each is known, if not exclusively. On the strength of the examples here, one can say, too, that each excels at printmaking. Warhol almost singlehandedly revived the art in the early ’60s, while in this, her first museum exhibition of prints, Ms. Peyton evinces an unsurprising, though consistently engaging, deftness. Both tend to work from mass-produced images, mainly photographs from magazines.

Like Warhol, Ms. Peyton seems an obsessive chronicler of her milieu and, like him, she seems very concerned with having a milieu. She makes a habit of calling famous people by their first names: “Julian,” as in Casablancas of the Strokes; “Chloe in W,” meaning Sevigny; “Oscar and Bosie,” meaning Wilde and his lover — even, I suspect, “Andy” as in Warhol, in “Andy’s Shoes.” The names sound as familiar as Warhol’s Polaroids (also on view) — of Elizabeth Taylor and Halston, Bianca Jagger and Truman Capote — seem.

There are other similarities, but it is where the two diverge that, I think, each comes into focus. Warhol remained somewhat formalist in his approach and concerns. From the beginning, you can see him trying out new avenues in printmaking. “Portraits of Artists” (1967) employs 100 polystyrene boxes in rows of white, pink, red, and yellow to form a grid of faces. In another series from 1967, he experimented with various canvas formats on which he silk-screened faces, all in black on green acrylic: Robert Rauschenberg centered on a square, Robert Morris in a narrow rectangle, Frank Stella in a black square printed askew, Donald Judd’s face filling a tiny rectangle.

When he takes up celebrity portraiture, as in the ’70s and ’80s, his manner — and these are highly mannered efforts — is also essentially formal, and distanced. Warhol was interested in celebrities not for what they did or who they “were” but as ciphers on which the public projects its fantasies, symbols as abstract as something in an Adolph Gottlieb painting. Usually centered and bust-length, they are almost always large, and the images often are repeated to emphasize the mechanical, and empty, nature of the product.

Of the later celebrity portraits, the monochrome screenprints are, to my eye, the most successful. There are seven at Guild Hall: “Liza Minnelli” (c. 1978) and “Debbie Harry” (c. 1980) have rouged lips, the others, including the thin “Truman Capote” (c. 1979), “Giorgio Armani” (c. 1981), and “Judy Garland” (c. 1979), are strictly black and white.

In the polychrome portraits, Warhol’s reserve, his ironic distance — not to mention taste — break down. The colors are meant in some sense to be garish: two “John Coplans” (c. 1972) on a green background; two of “Henry Geldzahler” (c.1979) with a vomit-like mix of brown and pink streaked across them. The pink “Nan Kempner” (c. 1972) features green around the eyes, a horror-show touch, and thick green abstract-expressionist squiggles that are less quotation than a bad decorator’s touch. “Georgia O’- Keeffe” (c. 1980), in yellow and orange, mixes diamond dust with the acrylic paint. A real proof of their mediocrity is that they all looked better on the cover of Interview magazine — as reproductions, in other words.

Ms. Peyton also uses O’Keeffe, in an etching, “Georgia (After Stieglitz 1918),” a younger, sexier Georgia than Warhol’s. But unlike Warhol, she wants to personalize her subjects — make the public personal, the famous familial. To do so, she almost always uses a small format, something intimate enough to suggest a snapshot on a mantelpiece yet large enough to sell: Sixteen inches by 12 inches would seem her ideal size.

She’s a capital-R Romantic, drawn to brooding waifs and delicate souls. “Nick (in Green and Red) (Two Palms),” the queen in “Balmoral (Queen Elizabeth II in the 1970s),” and “Rirkrit (Two)” (all 2002), all look downward, with coy deference to the beauty of it all. As a Romantic — rather than a formalist — she cares about history, and so the queen, Oscar Wilde, O’Keeffe, and John-John and Jackie all make appearances. Appearance is the operative word here; this is about a look. Happily, Ms. Peyton’s fine taste results in expert use of color: Indeed, she can transform a print into something as delicate and handwrought as a watercolor. She almost never stumbles when dressing these sheets.

In her personalizing drive, however, she also has a concern for emotions, which manifests itself in the quality of her line when drawing, or etching, as in the excellent, Whistlerian “Nick in L.A.” (2002). Even in his drawings from the ’50s, of which there is a broad and intriguing selection here, Warhol always had the halting line of a tracer. He wouldn’t have wanted to get close enough to get his hand on anything.

Still, as portraits of the artist, each of these shows turns its best face to the viewer. If you’re on the South Fork, you will definitely want to stop in and kiss a cheek.

Until October 22, Monday–Saturday, 11 a.m.–5 p.m., Sunday, noon–5 p.m. (158 Main St., East Hampton, 631-324-0806, $7).


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