She ‘defies the archetype of the good feminist’ — now Lisa Yuskavage is on top of the art world
The artist once courted disapproval from critics but her latest paintings prove that she’s at the peak of her powers
Julia Halperin
February 15, 2025
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Thirty years ago, the painter Lisa Yuskavage received what most people would consider to be the worst review of her life. Her husband couldn’t figure out why she was so delighted.
In Artforum, the critic Lane Relyea described Yuskavage’s paintings of perky-breasted, button-nosed women as “Hello Sex Kitties” and “visual stink bombs”. As soon as she read the brutal pan of her first Los Angeles solo show, “I knew I had arrived,” Yuskavage tells me over cinnamon-dusted coffee in her giant studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn. “The bat had connected to the ball in a big way.” She jokes that the review belonged in a folder with all the other venomous, but not inaccurate, responses to her work. She’d like to label it: “You Say That Like It’s a Bad Thing.”
Yuskavage — now aged 62 — has been courting disapproval for decades with her deeply saturated, often discomfiting portraits of nude white women. When she started out, figurative painting was out of fashion. Today, it is contemporary art’s most popular genre — and Yuskavage is on top of the art world. Her largest paintings cost more than $2mn. She’s represented by the mega-gallery David Zwirner, which opens a solo exhibition of her work at its Los Angeles flagship this month to coincide with Frieze LA. In June, the Morgan Library and Museum in New York will present the first comprehensive survey of her drawings.
Amid today’s glut of safe figurative painting, Yuskavage’s distinctive, round-bellied and buxom women still manage to make plenty of people uncomfortable. “She defies the archetype of the good feminist, which I think is key,” says the 33-year-old New York-based artist Emily Coan. “A lot of artists in my little pocket of the art world think of her as the queen. She shifted the paradigm for the next generation of figurative female painters.”
Lisa Yuskavage shifted the paradigm for the next generation of figurative female painters
Emily Coan
References to some of Yuskavage’s classic “visual stink bombs” appear, like Easter eggs, in her latest exhibition in LA — her first solo presentation in the city in almost three decades. For an artist who is well aware that some people still know her only as “the one who paints the big boobs”, it’s an opportunity to reintroduce herself. She’ll have you know that, in the intervening years, she has built up an oeuvre that is expansive and complex enough to serve as her primary source of inspiration. The woman who once notoriously mined the men’s magazine Penthouse for subject matter is now mining her own lore. Call it the Yuskavage Cinematic Universe.
Her latest paintings zoom out to capture an art-historical subject almost as traditional and weighty as the female nude: the artist’s studio. Yuskavage fills the spaces with callbacks to older works, recurring motifs, surreal touches and, in a new development, images of the artist at work. In one painting, Yuskavage’s likeness wears a paint-splattered lab coat and stands in front of a towering painting of a woman whose breasts are taller than her torso. “I liked how I could play with scale,” she says. “I thought it was funny.”
If painting a pubescent female nude with vacant eyes and unnerving orifices was her first taboo, Yuskavage is thrilled by her latest: capturing a middle-aged woman at the peak of her creative powers. These works suggest an artist who is comfortable in her mastery. “It’s like you’re an old witch now, and you’re off at the edge of town doing your thing,” she says. “The [earlier] artwork is a stand-in for my earlier, more developing self, and by inserting this worker bee person, it represents a different self.”
Yuskavage grew up in a working-class neighbourhood in Philadelphia; her father was a delivery truck driver and pie salesman and her mother a homemaker. She is an outlier in an art world where many come from generational wealth. When she arrived at the Yale School of Art in 1984, Yuskavage remembers feeling “so ashamed of my working-class sensibilities that I put them all away in deep storage”. It was only once she allowed those repressed thoughts — the shame, internalised misogyny, powerlessness, trashiness and kitsch — out to play that she found her voice as an artist.
After her father died in 2021, Yuskavage started video calling her mother while she worked; it’s part of the reason she began to think about putting herself in the frame. More often, however, she paints alone. Her only assistant focuses on administrative duties, like updating Yuskavage’s website, where each work is exhaustively catalogued and cross-referenced — yet another Marvel-style rabbit hole. The encyclopedic website is a testament to how seriously she has taken her evolution as an artist, even when others didn’t. “I built very strong muscles to swim hard against the noes,” she says.
In her horribly reviewed 1994 show, Yuskavage painted a pubescent nude staring blankly out at the viewer proffering a teacup. It was meant to unnerve and implicate, but it was dismissed by some as flat, cynical provocation. A similar figure reappears in “Tea and Cigarettes” (2024) — but now, the woman inhabits a distinctive, less cartoonish body. She is freed from the confines of the canvas and stands in the middle of a painting studio, staring at the teacup as if someone had just placed it in her hand. She is not serving the viewer; she has been served.
It turns out the model in “Tea and Cigarettes” is based on an unpublished photograph of Kate Moss that Yuskavage took for a portfolio in W magazine in 2003. Moss’s likeness stands in front of a work from Yuskavage’s 1994 show, “Big Blonde Squatting”, propped on an easel. Both the painting and the painting-within-a-painting are done in what the art historian Marcia Hall describes as the “blond manner”, a technique associated with the frescoes of the Italian Renaissance where the purest colour is captured in shadow and the rest is built up with white paint, creating an otherworldly luminosity. When Yuskavage first decided to show in LA in the 1990s, she latched on to the idea of a visual pun: painting California blondes in the blond manner.
“All the parts get sticky and come together,” Yuskavage says of her self-referential new chapter. “I know so much now, and I have so much material.”
After visiting Yuskavage, I reached out to Lane Relyea, now an associate professor at Northwestern, who wrote the pan in Artforum. “My writing back then was overheated in general,” he admits, but maintains that the works “were intended to provoke, and in that way I can see why Lisa liked my response”. Over the past 30 years, he has seen Yuskavage’s work evolve from what he considered “aggressive” images of underaged nude bodies to “spatially and psychologically strange” and “technically stunning” interiors. “Lisa deserves all the acclaim she’s received,” he concludes.
February 18-April 12, davidzwirner.com; June 27-February 4, themorgan.org
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