If Dufy and Manet had collaborated on pinups for Melody Maker, the results might look like Elizabeth Peyton’s meltingly romantic, dead cool portraits of red-lipped youngish men. Whether drawing or painting, Peyton has a deft, loose, and loving touch. Full of creamy flesh tones and atmospheric buzz, her pictures are a fan’s notes, and her subjects—Liam Gallagher, Lord Alfred Douglas, Leonardo DiCaprio, Prince Harry—are vividly idealized, if disconcertingly effeminate heartthrobs. For the artist’s first retrospective, curator Zdenek Felix has rounded up some 120 works, the earliest a 1990 drawing of Napoleon, as well as a group of Peyton photographs, some of which are the basis for recent paintings of intimate friends.

— Vince Aletti