Lot Essay
"One of the extraordinary things about Peyton's oeuvre is that it can serve as a chronicle of a particular period--at a certain moment in the history of culture in certain places among a few people who were enthusiastically making it. Sometimes they knew each other; sometimes they were just mutual fans. In retrospect, her paintings have become a kind of essence of a fifteen-year period in popular culture, something like a complicated perfume that retains the sensory grace notes of a hundred different exquisite elements, but on its own is distinct." (L. Hoptman, Live Forever Elizabeth Peyton, exh. cat., New York, 2008, p. 225).