Throughout her art career, Lisa Yuskavage (b. 1962) has explored the pressures of identification and stereotypes in her representations of female figures, challenging viewers with images that prompt internal reckonings with their own perceptions of gender, class, and status. The exhibition Lisa Yuskavage: Drawings, the first comprehensive museum presentation of Yuskavage’s works on paper, reveals the extensive range of Yuskavage’s experimentation with process and material in drawings produced from the early nineties to the present. Her bold usage of imagery, color, and symbolism—imagery that has elicited discomfort for being vulgar, low class, or overly sexual—can be understood as a call for people she identifies as being “from the margins” to mobilize the hidden parts of themselves as a means of combating a shameful cycle. In this blog post, I examine these ideas in relation to Yuskavage’s compelling blending of images rooted in personal observation and accessible media.
Acutely aware of the art historical questions concerning depictions of the nude throughout time, Yuskavage has inserted her own perspective into this enduring legacy. Specifically, Yuskavage confronts the awkwardness and insecurity that often accompany girlhood in the United States positing a unique reframing of conventional portraiture and nudes. Her dreamy yet vulnerable representations of young women evoke the shame and insecurity that follow women from early puberty through their adult years. With her images, Yuskavage confronts the internalized attitudes of viewers, encouraging us to grapple with the power dynamics and social conditions that inevitably shape us.
Yuskavage was raised in a Catholic household in Juniata Park, a working-class neighborhood of Philadelphia. From an early age, Yuskavage experienced first-hand the social prejudices that accompany class and gender distinctions. Exposed to examples of ‘high art’ through her arts education along with ‘low brow’ images of women found in popular sources like erotic magazines, Yuskavage sought to reckon with a broad and conflicting range of representation. When faced with her own insecurity upon entering the elite environment of the Yale School of Art, Yuskavage decided to confront her shame directly. Some of her titles, such as Asspicking, Foodeating, Headshrinking, Socialclimbing, Motherfucking Bad Habits (1996), speak directly to the uncomfortable labels she encountered and feelings she experienced.
“Sketchbook page for Blonde Brunette and Redhead” (1995) Collage, graphite, oil, and watercolor on paper. 12 x 11 in. (30.5 x 27.9 cm). Force Villareal Collection © Lisa Yuskavage. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.
One work in particular stood out to me as the perfect example of Yuskavage’s compelling yet highly analytical rendering of female subjects: Sketchbook page for Blonde Brunette and Redhead (1995) a study for Yuskavage’s triptych painting Blonde Brunette and Redhead (1995). This work is part of the Babies series, a moniker Yuskavage uses to refer to works that predate the Bad Habits. The Babies depict imagined figures with no external model, and they speak to the roles projected onto women in American society. As art historian Katy Siegel has argued, the three women in this drawing can be read as archetypes which speak to the limiting characteristics and typology assigned to women.
On the sketchbook page, Yuskavage experiments with red, yellow, and blue, a combination of starkly oppositional colors. In this, she was inspired by art historian Marcia Hall’s discussion of unione, a Renaissance technique which explores harmonizing bold, contrasting colors. In the triptych, Yuskavage sought to animate the flat tripartite primary color structure, challenging the strictures and rigidity of the color wheel. Unione is responsible for the soft but vibrant rendering she achieves.
Yuskavage's approach to color is painstakingly analytical, highlighted by the annotations and markings in her sketchbook. Notations listing color percentages and test spots of various color combinations appear all over the page. One note reads: “Too cerulean - more cobalt” with an arrow pointing to a pasted color swatch on the lower left side of the sheet. Other notes chart the final percentages of red, yellow, and blue for each square of the triptych. The final panels are each painted seventy percent one color, twenty percent a second color, and ten percent a third color. Yuskavage’s careful calculation of percentages translates to a lively coloristic blend. Her emphasis on perfecting the formula for her final painting reveals the level of care that she puts into analyzing, deconstructing, and then reframing the oppressive rules of representation.
“Blonde Brunette and Redhead” (1995) Oil on linen. 36 x 108 in. (91.4 x 274.3 cm). Private Collection © Lisa Yuskavage. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.
The triptych and sketchbook page highlight the highly personal process of combing through past experiences to find visual references to incorporate into the artwork. For the specific shades of red, yellow, and blue, Yuskavage drew from swatches by the fashion and home brand Laura Ashley. Pasting the swatches onto the page helped Yuskavage solve the challenge of how to blend such dissimilar hues. There is also a deeper significance to selecting Laura Ashley colors for her palette. In her Philadelphia neighborhood, Laura Ashley was viewed as a symbol of success–the place someone would shop after achieving a degree of wealth. A Laura Ashley logo pasted to the top of the page physically manifests the aspiration to higher status represented by decorating one’s home with the Ashley line. In this way, Yuskavage’s palette is associated with social performance, related here to class, a posturing that is reminiscent of the pressure to embody a specific female archetype.
Yuskavage emphasizes this archetypical presentation by assigning each of the figures a geometric form coinciding with the shape of their head: the blonde is a pyramid, the brunette a cylinder, and the redhead a sphere. Yuskavage’s figures are highly synthetic, based on a deliberate system for melding together disparate visual references and colors. The presentation of these heads with their exaggerated geometric shaping marks them as icons of female existence from which one can select. A woman is expected to fit into one of these boxes based on prescribed standards for behavior and physical beauty.
Confining her characters to a tidy box and, in the paintings, a perfect three-by-three square canvas, Yuskavage conveys the rigid mode of presentation projected onto women. However, Yuskavage’s treatment of the primary colors illuminates the limitations of these stereotypes. The once lifeless, contrasting colors are energized and blended through Yuskavage’s experimental mark, a blending that is carried into the final paintings. Yuskavage’s material and conceptual experimentation defies the separation of high art and popular culture, as well as the constraints that exist within each category.
In Sketchbook page for Blonde Brunette and Redhead, Yuskavage synthesizes elements of high art and everyday culture that she has absorbed through studying and observing representations of female figures in art history and society in general. She mobilizes existing systems while challenging these conventions. This sheet offers an important glimpse into the meticulous process whereby Yuskavage adapts representations of femininity into the worlds she envisions, laying out the true complexity of girlhood and womanhood.
Chimene Keys
Modern and Contemporary Drawings Intern
The Morgan Library & Museum
References
- Belcove, Julie L. 2006. Review of Lisa’s Women. W Magazine, November 2006.
- Enright, Robert. 2007. “The Overwhelmer: An Interview with Lisa Yuskavage.” Border Crossings. August 2007.
- Siegel, Katy. 2000. “Blonde Ambition: The Art of Lisa Yuskavage.” Artforum. May 2000.