There aren’t many artists in the last 40 years who’ve been written about quite as much or as fervently as the painter Lisa Yuskavage, who is 63 and based in Brooklyn. On her website, she makes available PDFs of every article in which she’s ever been mentioned, including not just the major interviews and reviews (even the unkind ones) but also reviews of other artists that simply cite her work. The archive begins in December 1985, when a student magazine at Yale published an image from her M.F.A. thesis project. Yuskavage is uncommonly attuned to the weight of public opinion, and her engagement with other people’s takes on her has helped bolster her conviction to make only the art she wants to make, whether it’s met with praise or bewilderment (or worse).
There’s been an ongoing critical debate about Yuskavage’s work because she is a woman who paints women, often nude, in an absurd state of sensuousness. This subject matter alone has, until recently, been suppressed from art history. She deploys the same delicate shading technique (known as sfumato) that the major Renaissance painters did, so that her figures seem to be emerging at the very moment the sun breaks through a morning fog. The paintings are executed with extreme care. They’re also dirty — just a little wrong. The curator Helen Molesworth once wrote about the embarrassment she felt when seeing Yuskavage’s paintings in the early 2000s, and her strong suspicion that “if a white man of a certain age had been the first to show me [her] work, I would have rejected it immediately.” In a New Yorker profile of the artist from 2023, Yuskavage’s former art dealer Marianne Boesky said, “I knew I shouldn’t like her work, but I did.”