Artist Dossier: Peter Doig

Artist Dossier: Peter Doig

Research by Caroline Puri, chart by Nigel Holmes

© Peter Doig, Courtesy Contemporary Fine Arts Gallery

Artist Dossier: Peter Doig

Claude Monet le Corbusier Peter Doig Gustav Klimt Edvard Munch Daniel Richter Living Lagerfeld The Weeks That Were (September 19 – October 3, 2008)

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Peter Doig has the résumé of an art superstar—he’s been showing his atmospheric landscapes in major international galleries and museums for more than a decade and is credited with inspiring a generation of young painters. Still, he has managed to stay relatively under the radar. So when White Canoe, 1990–91, sold for £5.7 million ($11.3 million), then the highest price ever paid for a work by a living European artist, to a Russian buyer at Sotheby’s London last February, the art world was stunned.

Although Doig’s paintings have been fetching six- and seven-figure prices at auction for the past five years and White Canoe is considered an extraordinary example of his painterly style, its record price has been regarded as a bit of a fluke. Nevertheless, museums and a few lucky collectors immediately snap up his new works, of which the artist makes only six to eight a year. “He has a show, people fall in love with the paintings, but they can’t buy them because the works are going to museums,” explains Francis Outred, senior director of contemporary art at Sotheby’s London and a longtime Doig supporter. “This pent-up demand creates a situation where people will go to the end of the earth to buy them.”

Could Doig’s current museum survey at the Tate Britain mean more auction records and even greater demand? Regardless of the market’s response to his pictures, Tate chief curator Judith Nesbitt says the moment is right for the artist’s first major retrospective: “Two decades of sustained development means there is a mature body of work to survey. And it’s always worth paying attention to someone whose output is so continually interesting to other artists as well as to the wider public.” The show, which is on view through April 27 and then travels to the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, features 50 paintings and a group of works on paper created from 1989 to the present, including portraits and landscapes, plus six brand-new-works.

Doig’s landscapes are richly layered—both formally and conceptually—and draw on a variety of art-historical references, from Munch and Monet to Friedrich and Klimt. His imagery is based on found postcards as well as photographs, some found and some that he has taken himself. Lake scenes with canoes, cabins nestled in the woods and skiers dotting mountain landscapes are his best-known and most repeated subjects. Despite the recognizability of Doig’s subjects, his painterly touch and off-kilter compositions create a dreamy strangeness that renders the familiar unsettling. “I’ve always made the case that he’s not an image painter; he’s a conceptual painter,” says Gordon VeneKlassen, of Michael Werner Gallery, in New York. “He finds something he likes and makes it in 15 different ways to adjust the surface.”

Doig’s appeal extends beyond aficionados of contemporary work. “One of the underbidders on White Canoe was an Impressionist and modern collector who was drawn by the very potent link with Klimt,” says Outred.

Born in Edinburgh in 1959, Doig moved to Trinidad as a child and then to Canada, where he spent most of his youth. He relocated to London to study art at St. Martin’s in the late 1980s and remained there until he returned to Trinidad in 2002. Doig was noticed fresh out of the master’s program at the Chelsea School of Art when, in 1991, he was awarded the Whitechapel gallery’s Artist Award and given a show at that prestigious London institution. “That was a big thing,” says Outred, adding that the paintings Doig made then have formed the “matrix for the rest of his work: In that show you see the first cabins, the first canoes.” Doig’s cabin paintings were inspired by a visit to the Unité d’Habitation, Le Corbusier’s Brutalist housing complex in Briey-en-Foret, France. Last October, Christie’s London sold Concrete Cabin, 1995–96, for £916,500 ($1.8 million), and at Sotheby’s London that same month, Briey, 1992, realized £58,100 ($119,000)—a significant price for a small oil on board.