CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/14/2020

"Less pretty, more beautiful." Nicholas Cullinan on 'Elizabeth Peyton: Aire and Angels'

Featured spread is from Elizabeth Peyton: Aire and Angels, published by National Portrait Gallery, London. NPG Director Nicholas Cullinan writes, "Peyton’s extraordinary and inimitable paintings, drawings and prints from the last ten years don’t look like anything or anyone else. Tough and tender, increasingly fluid—and in which the figure at times almost dissolves and dematerializes—her interest in agency and individual personality has amplified and come to the fore. Theodor Adorno once wrote of Beethoven’s refusal within a musical composition to ‘reconcile into a single image what is not reconciled.' In Peyton’s work there is a similar recognition of irreconcilability. Not all the prosaic details of the face and physiognomy she paints may always be there, but the character and psyche of the sitters certainly are."