This page contains a Flash digital edition of a book.
above: Elizabeth Peyton, Arsenal (Prince Harry), 1997, oil on board, 29 x 37cm. © the artist. Courtesy private collection, London, and Sadie Coles HQ, London
facing page: The Daily Telegraph, 1 December 1997
Hamilton and Gerhard Richter, to Judith Eisler and Elizabeth Peyton, to is especially drawn to a certain sort of streaking or blurring).
name a few of the artists included. That curator and Hayward director What is perhaps less clear is the effect a painting has, today, on
Ralph Rugoff has chosen not to flag these painters’ photographic sources its photographic original. Reviewing Edward Weston in The Nation
in the exhibition’s title is one clue to the originality of the show. For once, it in 1946, Clement Greenberg opined that ‘photography is the only
is not a matter here of an indistinctly defined critique of the photograph as art that can still afford to be naturalistic and that, in fact, achieves its
such, nor really a question of such hoary topics as the ubiquity or guile of maximum effect through naturalism’. Greenberg’s justified preference
the modern image per se. Rather, what The Painting of Modern Life essays for Walker Evans over Weston aside, this was an easy assertion to
is a subtler sense of the lures and allure of picture-making itself. make in the light of painterly abstraction, not so easy when painting
Which assertion makes it all the more perverse, perhaps, to treat has rediscovered representation, still less so now that the photograph
the source material of the artists in question as a body of images that is itself is the apparent target of its reference. So that one has to ask: what,
worthy of reflection in itself. In a sense, however, the formal and conceptual literally, do the photographs from which painting has increasingly taken
traffic from photograph to painting is all too obvious to us today. The its cue in recent decades now look like?
painting appropriates (or repudiates) the clarity (or obscurity) of the Consider, for example, the newspaper photograph from which
photograph, restages (or refuses) its fleeting engagement with the real, Elizabeth Peyton took the composition (though not exactly the
approaches (or blanks) its embrace of the instant. Whatever its take on physiognomy of her subject) for her Arsenal (Prince Harry) (1997),
the photograph, in other words, the painting is marked by it in ways that, one of several paintings Peyton made of the then recently bereaved
thanks to our contemporary nous regarding photographic conventions, young prince. As Peyton renders him, Harry has acquired a luminous
we can articulate with relative ease. The paintings all look like photographs, and winsome femininity that he does not have on the front page of
if not like each other (though The Painting of Modern Life, it’s worth noting, The Daily Telegraph of Monday, 1 December, 1997. The animated faces
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