The Brooklyn Rail

In the early 1990s, freshly graduated from the Yale School of Art, Lisa Yuskavage got a job teaching an adult education course in watercolor painting at Cooper Union. Bored by the curriculum but interested in the medium, Yuskavage began inserting bulbous breasts into the backgrounds of her demonstration works, experimenting with the edges of figurative recognition while doubling her sexually explicit forms with classic subjects of still life like pomegranates and lemons. The watercolor series, later named “Tit Heaven,” would come to be included in a breakthrough exhibition for Yuskavage at Elizabeth Koury Gallery, where they were shown alongside her now-famous “Bad Babies.”

Today, this anecdote has the mythic weight of an origin story, containing as it does all the nascent qualities of Yuskavage’s subsequent career: formal adventurism, absurd technical mastery, and an almost compulsive irreverence. Now sixty-three, Yuskavage is a major force in the contemporary art market and has been represented by blue-chip galleries for almost thirty years. But she has never had a major museum retrospective, and her work—which takes blonde, cartoonishly sexualized young women as its perennial subject—continues to provoke. Visitors to the Morgan Library & Museum who are unfamiliar with Yuskavage’s oeuvre may find themselves appalled by the small alcove gallery featuring Lisa Yuskavage: Drawings, since it acts as a waystation between the Gutenberg Bibles and a show of Jane Austen’s autographed letters.

The comparatively modest Yuskavage exhibition represents the first curatorial effort by Claire Gilman as the Morgan’s new Acquavella Curator and Department Head of Modern and Contemporary Drawings. Though the library and museum is best known for its illuminated manuscripts, its purview consists of any work made on paper, a remit it only occasionally extends to living artists. A consummate oil painter, Yuskavage has rarely made her drawings available for public viewing before. This makes Drawings a double revelation, providing a deft primer to Yuskavage’s formal preoccupations while making a case for the sketches as a synecdoche to a still-evolving career. Like many artists, Yuskavage does much of her preliminary drafting on paper, and, while only one work includes anything resembling unpolished notation, the show translates her history of technical innovation surprisingly well. (The “status” of many works in the exhibition seems deliberately veiled; in a walkthrough, Gilman seemed to indicate that many drawings had been previously unseen outside studio visits, while the checklist makes clear that everything, even sketchbook pages, hail from private collections.)

Yuskavage’s preliminary renderings for “Bad Babies,” which appear here in graphite on sketchbook paper, stand out for their unstudied impulsivity, possessing a crudeness reminiscent of George Condo. One senses the breakthrough Yuskavage was having at this moment, when the childish indulgence of “Tit Heaven” birthed a whole subject. From here on, the work becomes immediately more ambitious, with quasi-academic experiments in gouache, pastel, and conté crayon abstracting her continually provocative bodies.

Over the years, Yuskavage has worked from imagination, painted maquette models in the manner of still lifes, and gone back and forth on using live models, including a childhood friend named Kathy. The live model studies, thematically concentrated in the gallery’s southwest corner, reveal a pathos that’s often lacking in Yuskavage’s work—a responsibility to the subject, to something beyond the artist’s own wit. It seems relevant that one of her most lauded and least erotic paintings, True Blonde IV (At Home) (1999), featuring Kathy, dates from this period. (A study from the same year, included here, entered the Morgan’s collection on the occasion of the show.) But Yuskavage is not a portraitist. In its final form, True Blonde is more a study of Vermeer-style lighting than an evocation of a particular expression or mood, and alterations between the study and the final work make it clear that her goal is not fidelity to Kathy. Once again, technique announces itself as a means without end.

Especially in their role as studies or drafts, Yuskavage’s drawings emphasize a dialectic that’s at the heart of all of her work: the straight-A student versus the back-of-class troublemaker. Whether she is exploring light through ink washes or staging maquettes in the mode of Tintoretto, Yuskavage is one of the most attentive and technically proficient interpolators of classical technique working today—a fact that she consistently undercuts with her libidinally exaggerated subjects. Students of art history might reference multiple Old Masters when speaking about her paintings. Outside a gallery context, they seem more like soft-core porn.

Yuskavage has said that her overriding interest lies in “making something synthetic,” which she defines as creating a believable effect through artificial means. Her choice of fraught, creepy subjects increasingly seems like a challenge the artist has set for herself, to overcome questions of meaning through pure technical strength. Her impolitic depictions of women also function as a critique of art history itself, calling out, with grotesque exaggeration, the objectification of idealized female beauty as depicted by male painters from time immemorial. In October, the Morgan’s Yuskavage exhibition will be joined by Renoir Drawings in the gallery next door. That celebrated Impressionist specialized in rendering young women to plasticine, doll-like effect. Other than a penchant for home truths, how different are Yuskavage’s creations from his?