Total mastery, via the something that’s missing.
Piggyback, 2009
“Bring me my arrows of desire. Bring me my Chariot of fire!” — William Blake
Feeling is first.” — e.e. cummings
I drove into New York City on the Fourth of July. Chelsea was a ghost town. This left the roads and highways as fast as I’ve ever enjoyed heading into the tunnels. I stay in Morristown, because I can get a suite for half the cost of a walk-in closet of a room in Midtown, plus I’m treated to the piccolo calls of wood thrushes outside my window. Usually, from deep in New Jersey’s wooded hills, it can take as long as ninety minutes and rarely less than half that to get under the Hudson and into SoHo. This weekend it was half an hour. Downtown, the pedestrian traffic was so sparse I imagined tumbleweed rolling down 21st Street (growing up in Idaho imprints itself on the brain), but Times Square at night was nearly as packed as usual and the Metropolitan Museum was a zoo of casual tourists and reliably well-dressed sophisticates. There was a line at the second-floor ladies restroom. New York City was as alive as ever.
I was grateful for the holiday’s radically reduced my art-viewing options. A gallery tour was off the list. The Chelsea galleries look for an excuse to close. (And they’ve been doing it permanently for many years.) As the hardest working art dealer in the business, who remained open on the holiday, told me, “The other gallerists look for any excuse to beat it out of town. National Popcorn Day will do.” The vacancy of Chelsea forced me to spend my afternoon in the best possible way, at the Morgan and the Met. I’d planned on only three inflexible attractions. I wanted to see the Lisa Yuskavage drawings at the Morgan and to visit Arcadia Contemporary for Crosswalk by Sun Eun Kim. Plus, I got a seat at the bar for the Christian Sands Quartet at Birdland where the early set was a killer mix of melodic interpretations bookended by bebop.
Lisa Yuskavage: Drawings is a must-see show of artistic struggle and mastery. It’s also yet another lesson in how so much art since the advent of modernism requires double vision: you recognize the elite skill of whatever is being done and yet also see how something is missing. This something can be interpreted as the actual subject of the work, but to asssert that is often a way for the critical consensus to ignore the long-standing predicament of visual art. Random idiosyncrasy has replaced the imperative of historical progress or any kind of higher calling for art. There’s still the dreary, dutiful observance of post-modern social justice which some want to see as a stand-in for religion.
Before I drove down, I was not excited about this trip, because my preview online of what is being shown right now in the galleries left me dispirited. The element of pleasant surprise is mostly missing. Yuskavage was at the top of my list because it’s erotically powerful in a light way—you’re actually meant to feel something when looking at the actual work, while feeling distant from it and a little embarrassed by the enjoyment. I didn’t anticipate how complicated my reaction would be, nor how technically superb her work is. As Yuskavage once suggested to her critics: “Have you seen the work in person?”
Eros has been her central preoccupation from the beginning. Years ago, Donna Rose, at Art Brokerage, told me that she helped give the young Yuskavage her start by selling photographs the artist had been taking in strip clubs. If there’s any surviving evidence of that photography it’s impossible to find on the Internet, but hanging around a topless bar would be the perfect place to study the state of semi-make-believe eroticism she offers and the ambiguous balance of power between those looking and those being seen. You can see the pose of pole dancers in many of her nudes even now.
It was interesting to see her work nd then ride uptown to the Met for a glimpse of Madame X in the John Singer Sargent exhibition. What a difference a century makes: the formal portrait of his model depicted her in a low-cut gown with one shoulder strap hanging loose (the Met offered a study that preserved this detail, while the actual painting had been retouched long ago to show both straps securely where they belong to prevent further criticism.) That one detail, along with the model’s plentiful use of make-up, attracted scorn and outrage over such subliminal indications of her seductive charms. At the time, these now innocent-seeming details shocked the public. It’s hard to believe the model’s reputation was forever stained, and Sargent moved away from Paris to avoid scorn after the painting inspired a storm of controversy. One loosened shoulder strap in the 19th century caused an uproar while Yuskavage’s depictions of spread-eagled, naked young women are celebrated now as boldly transgressive. Sargent’s painting was a reminder of what’s missing in Yuskavage, and contemporary art in general: a moral and esthetic anchor that gives the viewer a reliable way to feel about what’s on view. One always wonders, is this genuine or ironic? As a result, it’s hard to answer the simple question: “Is this actually a good thing I’m looking at or not?” This absence of clear standards can be touted as a post-modern opening for critical theory about a woman’s power over men or lack of it (the standard social justice stand-in for religion), but it remains as evidence that the spiritual center of our culture hasn’t held. All standards in art and elsewhere have become subjective. This offers an opening for genuine originality. But it also means reputations are now heavily touted and guarded mostly to establish and preserve their dollar value.
This painter’s own ambivalence about what she’s doing gives it a unique energy and, in a way, has required Yuskavage to achieve the technical mastery so evident in her mature work. While I was looking at a group of drawings, I heard a young woman let out a little yelp of bafflement behind me, walking past. It was involuntary, a hiccup of skeptical amusement: as if to say seriously? I glanced back and exchanged a smile of agreement. Was this a good thing we were seeing?
Technically, it was more than good. Her skills are a marvel. Her sense of color and the brevity of what she shows in order to let the viewer imagine so much more: it’s a level of skill few artists share. The nubile and perilously young figures hold your gaze long enough to see that they are themselves often transparent outlines of all-over undercoatings of neutral color that constitute much of the surrounding landscapes. In Neon Sunset, her prone nymph is established in the same way that Yuskavage creates the tree line and bank of the stream in the foreground: by using lighter tones to carve what’s shown from the monotone value underneath. The ground becomes the figure while the distance distinguishes itself by emerging in tone from the rest of the surface. Her voluptuous sprite emerges as an absence of the distant surrounding light. You can gaze at the picture for a few seconds before you even realize the woman is there. (Mother Earth indeed, though clearly this is no mother.) She emerges like a protrusion of the riverbank closer to the viewer. So she becomes the embodiment of the natural scene, a kind of pagan representation of nature itself. Ironically, her pose is cartoonishly pornographic, with buttocks shaped unnaturally like balloons and nearly as shiny. Yuskavage undercuts her marvelous, quiet twilight with the anime-like curve and sheen of her figure. As with all the later work, the technique is masterful, almost always employing the simplest possible kind of marks to establish convincing form and shape and volume.
In the realm of transgressive imagery, Yuskavage has a friendly, light touch. Her drawings are far more restrained, and certainly more fun, than Picasso’s Vollard suite—she’s far more modest in her R-rated visions. Yet, like Picasso’s, her sexual fantasies aren’t anchored in social codes that establish what’s permissible in a way that created boundaries for her cheerfully erotic Rococo antecedents, Boucher and Fragonard. Fragonard’s Progress of Love at the Frick is a monument to civilized courtship and gives testimony to the power of a woman’s ability to catch and control men and to the standard of social codes about how marriage happens. Women hold the power in Fragonard. Men hardly exist in Yuskavage and that absence creates the sense that you’re entering a world of sexual fantasy where the coquette and her best friend are equal partners. Power isn’t what’s being depicted. The male gaze is hovering around the painting, of course, but it isn’t really essential or even an element of the subject. Her paintings are all about the women.
We’re flying blind when it comes to sexuality now as we are when it comes to painting in general. (When political figures don’t know how to define the term woman, we’re in the uncharted wild.) Every painter now has to find some kind of inner necessity, as Kandinsky put it, and develop an idiosyncratic way of seeing. There’s no historical justification for a particular kind of work: it’s all been done, the frontiers have all been opened. A painter has to find a personal way to do what’s most visually compelling. Yuskavage has found her inner necessity. She paints what pushes her to push paint. “Bring me my arrows of desire,” Blake sang. She’s embraced her lavish, flamboyant eroticism as a personal drive to make pictures, but at the same time she’s watching the whole process of making her work with a dispassionate and ironic attention that restrains what she’s doing in many stylistic ways. She’s never explicit. She suggests rather than shows, the way Turner did in his erotic work, withholding detail and using her scenes as an armature for formal challenges, exploring intense color harmonies and evocations of atmospheric light. She finds ways to make her dazzling and expressive use of color itself the primary appeal. A pink or acid green haze induces a psychological state in the viewer and becomes a kind of cosmic equivalent of her desire’s tranquil excitement. But eros is just the hook she’s used to do things that aren’t limited at all to sexuality. In the best work at the Morgan, she finds a way to do what artists have been doing for centuries: show the viewer a world where figure and ground give you an emotional sense of a space lit by a recognizable light that has emotional power. You step into her world.
At this point in her career, she might consider using these techniques to move beyond what’s been driving her to make art for decades in the way Jenny Saville has been trying to do, as she draws from Renaissance art to explore the human figure in far more restrained ways than in her past work. With Yuskavage, her current studio paintings use a monochrome color scheme and often feature a nude model in a less dramatic way. But it isn’t nearly as powerful as the earlier work. Her most evocative work is Piggyback Ride, from 2009, a nearly grisaille image of a nubile young woman giving a ride across a river to what has to be another young woman on her back. What’s powerful about these nearly life-sized figures is how they emerge so distinctly into the foreground while the distant horizon is so gauzily indicated, even while being deeply spacial. All the details in the figures are so minimal that eyes and hands are almost erased, but are distinctly there in a way you can imagine and feel. You can see what isn’t even visible in the marks. They reside there without being shown. But what is shown is amazing: one tiny eye that expresses a world of sorrow and care and love. How is the shape of that eye possible at that scale? It’s like the tiny El Greco I saw many years ago, where the lose, rough brushwork conjured faces far smaller yet with even more expressive power. In her painting, this minimally indicated contrast between foreground and distance, where she has used a nearly uniform gray to unify the image and serve as both warm intimacy and the shadow from which the distance shines so brightly—it’s total mastery. Her next level is to do that with the color she so deeply loves in scenes that don’t revolve around exposed breasts. Not that there’s anything, ahem, wrong with them . . . for the record.
Yuskavage’s ability to draw in almost any medium is astonishing as is the bravura quality of her mark-making. The great pleasure of this exhibition is seeing how she can get almost any medium to do things few artists are ever able to pull off, which is actually the more important quality she has in common with Sargent. One wonders if Yuskavage might try moving beyond her female nudes—break away from her erotic brand identity—and simply depict what she sees in the everyday world around her, sexy or not, putting her lavish, rare talents to use in ways that celebrate a commonplace but utterly human way of seeing that doesn’t trigger that little ambivalent laugh I heard behind me in my visit to the Morgan. Get out of the studio and show a world with the same twilight economy she has used so powerfully and just be literal and let the beauty emerge from that engagement with the depiction of emotional closeness and physical distance as she did so consummately in 2009’s Piggyback Ride. I suspect Yuskavage would need to find a new, personal inner necessity for that to happen. The only axiom left in the art world now is that anything’s possible. That happens to be my spiritual faith for human life in general as well. One can only hope.
