The Verve and Confrontation of Lisa Yuskavage’s Naked Ladies
The Austrian artist Valie Export, who died last week, at the age of eighty-five, saw the female body as a site of both seduction and opposition. Starting in the late nineteen-sixties, in her performance-art pieces, Export wielded her own sexual appendages like weapons—keenly and audaciously. In “Action Pants: Genital Panic” (1968), she walked around a movie theatre in crotchless trousers, her naked vulva at the audience’s eye level. (A photograph by the same title, from 1969, shows her wearing the pants, her gaze trained straight on the camera and a machine gun cradled in her arms; a profusion of pubic hair sprouts from between her spread legs as a kind of dare.) In “Tap and Touch Cinema” (1968-71), Export took to the streets of Vienna and other European cities with her bare breasts encased in a curtained-off box, inviting passersby to reach in and have a squeeze, for a brief, strictly measured span of time. Attracting and menacing her viewers in equal measure, she compelled them to engage with her body while also challenging this very engagement. What does it mean to observe women’s bodies, Export asked, whether for edification, or pleasure, or titillation? Might there be something aggressive or wrong about this act of observation, and might we expect the woman being observed to then take this aggression and wrongness and flip it, metabolize it, make it into something altogether new—perhaps, even, into art?
I happened to learn of Export’s death as I was entering Lisa Yuskavage’s new exhibition at the David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea—a coincidence that felt oddly resonant. Though Export’s radical feminist art grew out of a particular political moment that had pretty much passed by the time Yuskavage began her career, the artists nonetheless share a rabble-rousing sensibility and an obsession with the unnerving visual punch of the female body. Yuskavage, who is now in her sixties, began showing her paintings in the nineteen-nineties, and has since become one of the most important—and certainly one of the most successful—American figurative painters working today. Still, her art wasn’t always considered a shoo-in for the contemporary canon. In a Profile of Yuskavage, published in this magazine in 2023, my colleague Ariel Levy traced the artist’s struggle in the earlier years of her career to gain recognition for her work, largely because of the trickiness of her perennial subject matter, which Levy defined as “a particular kind of naked lady.”
The history of art is littered with naked ladies, of course, from Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” to Ingres’s “Grande Odalisque” to Picasso’s “Nude Woman in a Red Armchair,” but Yuskavage’s ladies are, indeed, of a particular kind, and could quite easily be taken for what the artist’s husband, Matvey Levenstein, jokingly called “stroke material for the patriarchy,” in Levy’s Profile. Nude or near-nude, pert or pendulous of breast and bare or near-bare of pudendum, these women—rendered with great verve and skill, mostly in oils, but, occasionally, in pastels, graphite, collage, or watercolor—are sexy in a pornographic, girly-mag sort of way. (To characterize her figures further, my above use of “breast” and “pudendum” could and perhaps should have been swapped out for “tit” and “pussy,” the more appropriate terms here.) These women are the sloe-eyed Penthouse Pets and ditzy “Laugh-In” go-go dancers and buxom and bouffant Little Annie Fannies that Gen X-ers like myself would catch startling, enticing glimpses of as children when we thought the adults weren’t looking. Depicted as tropes rather than as subjects, the women in Yuskavage’s paintings have always reminded me of an old magazine interview with Courtney Love, in which she described her days as a stripper in Los Angeles in the eighties, before she made it as a musician, and explained the conventional economics of the whole endeavor. “If you even try and slip a little of yourself in there you won’t make any money,” she cautioned. “You’ve got to have white pumps, pink bikini, fuckin’ hairpiece, pink lipstick. Gold and tan and white.”
Gold and tan and white: these heady, glittering chromas are metaphorically definitional for Yuskavage, even when, literally speaking, she expands her palette much wider, to include reds and greens, blues and yellows, as she does in the Zwirner show. Still, her figures’ blond-and-rose bodies continue to effortlessly capture our eye in their baby-doll come-hitherness. Their easy, hedonic seductiveness emerges, too, via Yuskavage’s lush, rounded, fleshy brushstrokes (a different sort of stroke material, for the patriarchy or for anyone else), which render everything from boobs to bellies to nipples smooth and swollen, like a succulent fruit fixing to burst.
In the Zwirner exhibition, these women are almost always depicted inside of an art studio. Often, they appear to be models, standing alone or in a group, as if in mid-pose, or waiting between poses. Sometimes, they seem to be artists themselves, although their approach toward the canvas is more languid than intentional. And sometimes they are joined in the space by a fully clothed, brown-haired woman—seemingly an avatar for Yuskavage herself. Brush in hand, she is dwarfed by huge canvases within the paintings on which bare-breasted figures are in the process of emerging—a waiflike handmaiden hard at work at the feet of her American Helens of Troy. In “Painter Painting,” from 2024, her smocked figure, standing in front of a portrait in progress, almost literally bisects two enormous painted tits, like a humble human bra clasp. Only in “Self Portrait: Red Yellow Blue,” from 2025, does her bespectacled, sandals-wearing person seem to be painting another version of herself—a grave-looking brunette wearing a schoolmarmish green turtleneck—as three perky-boobed models stand in the background, staring indifferently into space.
Both within the canvas and without it, Yuskavage is playing with familiar figures of twentieth-century American sexual fantasy. Like Love’s version of a clever stripper, these women don’t seem to be slipping even a little bit of themselves in there; and yet the fact that they make for beautiful, blank objects is, paradoxically, what makes for their staying power. There they are, popping up again and again, in canvas after canvas, like a random intrusive thought that refuses to go away, or a masturbatory fixation that both disturbs and excites. In the left canvas of the large triptych “Endless Studio (portal),” from 2025, a young woman in profile—wearing only skimpy underwear and thigh-high socks—carries a steaming mug of something or other through an atelier, the curve of her belly parallelling the magnificent tail of a peacock at the edge of the painting. The woman’s one visible breast is, surprisingly, nearly flat, but her nipple is round and oversized and rosy, like a Christmas-tree ornament or a clown’s rubber nose. In her paintings, Yuskavage often depicts round beads or globes—the triptych’s right canvas, in fact, includes one green and one yellow ball, rolling on the studio floor—and it’s not difficult to imagine these as appendages or costuming props. Like Bozo putting on his circus getup, Yuskavage’s girls clock in at the studio, slapping on their socks, their panties, their outsized nipples. Then they stand there, looking mute and disaffected. They are both the weakest (they’re all surface, they can’t speak) and the most powerful (they fill our heads to bursting). We hate naked ladies and we love them, we revile naked ladies and we venerate them, and not unlike Valie Export in her work Yuskavage makes us confront this doubleness.
I continued to think about this conundrum as I caught up a few days ago with the third season of Sam Levinson’s lurid HBO drama “Euphoria.” In the fifth episode, Cassie, played by Sydney Sweeney, has embarked on an increasingly successful OnlyFans career. The classic sexy, big-boobed American blonde—a Yuskavage girl look-alike—Cassie engages in all manner of online sex work. She teases her subscribers by recording jerk-off-instruction videos, sells them her soiled underwear, and poses nude or nearly nude for explicit pictures. In a sequence early in the episode, Cassie is creating O.F. content in her bedroom to satisfy her hordes of horny followers, when she suddenly begins to grow enormous, like the titular protagonist in the nineteen-fifties B movie “Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.” Now huge, she emerges from her home to wander the streets of downtown Los Angeles in a leopard-print bodysuit, her heavy footfalls terrorizing fleeing passersby, and her flaxen ponytail swatting a police helicopter attempting to stop her. Approaching one high-rise, she spies an office drone masturbating to a video of hers on his computer. As she pushes her bare bosom against the man’s window, he rushes to lick her nipples through the glass, until the weight of her breasts breaks it, sending the man flying back helplessly in a spray of shards. In the so-called real world of “Euphoria,” Cassie isn’t doing that great. Her husband manipulates her, her best friend hates her, her sister derides her; her entire existence is thin and precarious. And yet, in the world of American fantasy, she is paramount. “She knew this was her destiny,” the show’s voice-over intones, as Cassie stomps on, toward the Hollywood sign. “To triumph. To conquer. To win.” We couldn’t ignore her if we tried. ♦