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.
