Miss Peanut (Leigh Bowery)
The highlight of MOMA’s Lucian Freud etchings exhibition is a tiny six inch oil painting of Leigh Bowery who regularly sat for Freud. Bowery was basically a transvestite nightclub diva, but with so much originality that his act transcended camp superficiality and his outfits are now recognized as works of art, like Freuds paintings of him without them.
The irony of Freud’s paintings are that Bowery, famous for being clothed and glam is show unceremoniously naked and fat. In similar ironic vein, here is Bowery in New York parading around a sun bleached, decrepit city that looks like New York used to, in one of his outfits: Leigh on Bowery, in the flesh but fully clothed.