The baby-faced blonde with big pink breasts spreading her legs in Lisa Yuskavage’s Split, 1995, wears nothing but a tiny tangerine shrug and a “come hither, Humbert” look. The invitation might be erotic, but the scene is not: Her legs taper into tentacles, her nipples point in opposite directions, and a mouth is not her only missing orifice. Even the pubescent cutie-pies with intact anatomy who populate Yuskavage’s paintings are made repellent by their saccharine trappings. More than thirty years of underage popsies rendered in Jordan-almond pastels and smoldering shades of red, gold, and acid green were on parade in “Babie Brood: Small Paintings 1985–2018,” a survey of nearly one hundred studies and small works in David Zwirner’s Chelsea space.
When Yuskavage first unveiled her harems of button-nosed jailbait in the early 1990s, writers responded with prose fit for the Book of Revelation. These paintings were straight-up “soft porn,” pronounced the prominent feminist art historian Amelia Jones in the Washington Post. Yuskavage was not only making “a travesty of the medium,” the scholar and critic Lane Relyea wrote in the pages of this magazine, she was “caricaturing women in an ideological shorthand and raping them.” The ’90s were a tricky time to be a woman painting sexualized female bodies. To be a good feminist, it seems one had to either explicitly rail against misogyny (Sue Williams), assert female sexuality (Nicole Eisenman), or be far more obviously ironic than Yuskavage was when channeling the gaze of the oppressor (Lutz Bacher, with her tongue-in-cheek Playboy pinups).
The sight of Yuskavage’s infantilized women remains unpleasant even today, likely because the artist’s position regarding her subjects remains ambiguous. The power of the paintings is largely due to the opacity of her intention. If the work is about objectification, Yuskavage does not exempt herself from a mass culture that puts pouting, half-naked teenagers on billboards at the same time that it censures pedophilia. Although critics have compared her to Paul McCarthy, usually to condemn both artists for exploiting shock value, what the pair actually have in common is the impulse to probe what they themselves might find disgusting.