ELIZABETH PEYTON OPENS TONIGHT AT GALLERY MET

Wotan Taking Away Brünnhilde's Godlike Powers will be featured in Elizabeth Petyon's Gallery Met exhibition.
Courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown's enterprise.

“It’s a challenge to embrace Wagner as a human being, not as hard to embrace him as an artist,” says Elizabeth Peyton, whose new solo exhibition of works inspired by the composer’s Ring cycle opens in Gallery Met on February 24. “He was awful in so many ways but had such epic creativity. To make a narrative so transcendent is a gigantic feat, and the music is mind-blowing.” Peyton’s exhibition, simply titled Wagner, is the second in a series of four Ring-inspired shows planned for Gallery Met this season and next. The exhibitions coincide with Robert Lepage’s new Ring production, which began with Das Rheingold and continues on April 22 with Die Walküre. “I chose Elizabeth for this project because she’s not only one of the strongest artists of her generation, but she has an uncanny ability to say something new about historical figures through her portraits,” says Gallery Met director Dodie Kazanjian. “It seemed like the Ring might open another door to her imaginative thinking.” Known for her small but vibrant portraits of such figures as Kurt Cobain, John Lennon, Prince William, and Michelle Obama, among others, Peyton was a newcomer to opera when she was approached to create work for the Met. But an immersion in Wagner recordings helped her realize the new pieces. “I listened to the Ring a lot while I was making the pictures for the show, along with Tristan und Isolde and Tannhäuser —I was listening to the new Kanye West record a bit too,” says the artist, whose work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. “There is a sound of human emotions that Wagner captures that is so heartbreaking. I was thinking about that a lot, about the power of being able to express those kinds of feelings in art.” —Matt Dobkin
















Wagner is on display in Gallery Met,
in the Met’s south lobby, through the end of
the season.


This article was first published online in January 2011 and in the Met's Playbill in February 2011.

LACMA and the Getty Acquire Robert Mapplethorpe Art and Archive

Monday's announcement that LACMA and the Getty Museum together acquired over 2,000 photographs by the artist, with a robust archive going to the Getty Research Institute, came as a surprise to art experts for many reasons. It was the first joint acquisition by LACMA and the Getty, arranged at a time when the latter is searching for a new president and museum director. And while both museums have strong photography programs, neither had particularly deep holdings in Mapplethorpe. Before this deal, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art had seven photographs, says department head Britt Salvesen. The Getty Museum had "a few Polaroids and a platinum print," says acting director David Bomford. The Guggenheim had previously ranked as the recipient of the biggest donation from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. But perhaps most striking of all was the fact that the foundation, which since the artist's death in 1989 has actively sold his prized black-and-white images through top galleries at top prices (benefitting AIDS research and museum photography departments), had this much material left to give. This was not a collection of leftovers but "a print of virtually every editioned photograph" done in his lush black-and-white silver gelatin process, including an entire XYZ Portfolio with his most controversial S&M imagery. (Think self-portrait with bullwhip planted in anus.) Michael Stout, president of the Mapplethorpe Foundation in New York and the artist's friend and lawyer, explained, "Many of the works going to Getty and LACMA are things we almost secretly reserved for this day." "Our goal was for the museums to have everything they wanted to tell the full story of Robert Mapplethorpe's life and creative life," he said. The foundation will continue to sell images from editions not already sold out, he says, but has relinquished its archival "responsibility and burden." Salvesen at LACMA added that Mapplethorpe's silver gelatin prints were not in any event printed by the artist himself: they were done either under his supervision or posthumously, per his permission, by the foundation. "We're not getting brand new prints of anything made just for us," she adds.
Los Angeles Times