Lisa Yuskavage, “Cuatro” (2003), Conté crayon on vellum (all photographs Natalie Haddad/Hyperallergic)
Lisa Yuskavage: Drawings is within the Morgan Library & Museum’s small Thaw Gallery, however it matches in loads of naked breasts, tumescent tummies, and completely rounded bottoms. All are skillfully rendered, and belong to girls with few individualizing options. Visiting the present is just a little like coming upon J. P. Morgan’s secret Playboy grotto.
However what caught my consideration greater than the exhibition’s works have been a number of phrases on the establishment’s web site: “female transgression and empowerment.” Phrases like “transgression” come up lots in texts about Yuskavage and her artwork, typically in a optimistic gentle. So do “provocative” and “vulgar,” often used to sign the stuffiness of artwork varieties.
Yuskavage portrays her topics in eventualities that vary from voyeuristic to demeaning. But these are younger, White girls — horny naifs and intercourse kittens — with our bodies and faces that conform to acquainted Western magnificence requirements even (or typically particularly) of their cartoonishly exaggerated varieties. Whereas work just like the self-explanatory “Pie Face” and the associated “Ficus” (2007 and 2008, not within the present) could set off girls’s anxieties about sexual harassment and violence, the figures embody a patriarchal establishment of female desirability, and the privileges that include it.
Lisa Yuskavage, “Piggyback Ride” (2009), charcoal and pastel on paper
I’m not suggesting that Yuskavage’s imaginary girls have it straightforward. However when a author asserts {that a} portrait of a conventionally enticing lady pulling up her high to show her bare physique, as an illustration, is transgressive, the place does that go away people who find themselves stigmatized quite than celebrated as transgressive? In different phrases, a nude, blond, coquettish lady painted in saturated hues, with outsized “knockers” (sure, they’ve been known as that), could mock outdated requirements of style in artwork circles which have by no means seen Paul McCarthy slathered in ketchup — or any variety of really subversive girls efficiency artists. But within the broader cultural sphere, they reiterate cis-het beliefs of femininity. Actual transgression — the sort that doesn’t pique such curiosity from artwork sellers and collectors — is reserved in our society for marginalized figures: for starters, girls of coloration, trans ladies and men, gender-nonconforming individuals, and anybody dwelling with disabilities or veering from culturally accredited requirements of weight, top, and even symmetry.
From this vantage level, are Yuskavage’s epitomes of the female, to paraphrase a latest article, actually difficult something? Or, maybe extra to the purpose, what’s gained by making the artist right into a provocateur?
Lisa Yuskavage, “Iridescent Studio” (2025), pastel and ink
Among the many gems I examine Yuskavage after seeing the present, this line by critic Christian Viveros-Fauné is a standout: “Within her own medium, the Philadelphia-born, Yale-educated artist’s influence appears both general and specific — like the color of the sky or the average woman’s self-image.” Thanks for that perception; I’m certain the “average woman” appreciates it.
Statements like this are insidious as a result of they carry out the very misogyny that’s typically attributed to the artist. In the identical vein, critics’ fetishization of this work as thrilling or empowering (to whom?) in its forbidden glimpses of flesh speaks to the deep entanglement between heteronormative fashions of feminine desirability and objectifying and debasing visuals of girls. We don’t even want to take a look at porn, one among Yuskavage’s early sources, for proof; we will simply sit at Hooters and skim the most recent difficulty of Maxim. Or watch virtually something on TV. Calling this artwork provocative or confrontational creates solely an phantasm of empowerment, as such descriptors are withheld from a lot artwork by girls and about girls’s points. For some critics, like Viveros-Fauné, it’s additionally a means of dismissing anybody who’s not on board with the content material, the so-called “finger-waggers.”
Lisa Yuskavage, “Neon Sunset” (2013), monoprint with hand additions in pastel mounted on aluminum
In response to different previous critiques, the work is moreover able to “reclaiming and upending the nude” (W Journal) and “turning the male gaze inside out,” in addition to “illuminat[ing] present feminine discontents” (each from The New Yorker, the latter with the title “Girls, Girls, Girls,” a la Mötley Crüe). Some feedback are illuminating, however possible not in the way in which that the creator meant, as in an essay on the Morgan’s web site: “With her images, Yuskavage confronts the internalized attitudes of viewers, encouraging us to grapple with the power dynamics and social conditions that inevitably shape us.” It’s price noting the common “us” that’s used again and again in these texts. Those that inhabit unidealized or othered our bodies face very totally different social situations than the artist’s theoretical topics — they confront such energy dynamics daily.
This isn’t nearly Yuskavage, although. It’s a bigger query of who in artwork, or broader tradition, is allowed to be transgressive, and who reinforces these choices — right here, the artwork critics and curators who posit go-to beliefs of womanhood as a tantalizing problem to propriety. Positioning the dominant tradition at each the middle and periphery is a simple solution to erase anybody who is definitely struggling for recognition on the margins of our social system. Any Playboy Bunny can inform you: Intercourse alone doesn’t upend the established order.
Lisa Yuskavage, “Dysfunctional Dancer” (1994), pastel
Set up view of Lisa Yuskavage: Drawings on the Morgan Library & Museum
Lisa Yuskavage, “Hippies” (2013), pastel on toned paper
Lisa Yuskavage: Drawings continues on the Morgan Library & Museum (225 Madison Avenue, Murray Hill, Manhattan) by January 4, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Claire Gilman.
