Sometime not long ago, before the pandemic rendered such gatherings unconscionable, I met up with a few fellow critics for drinks at a friend’s house. At one point in the evening, during a boisterous discussion about artists’ personal politics, someone casually remarked that so-and-so was ‘definitely a misogynist’, and everyone roundly agreed before cantering on with the conversation.
I didn’t catch the name of the artist to whom they were referring, except that it was that of a woman. The next day, I couldn’t stop wondering about the comment, and about the consensus that had immediately formed in the room. (All present were men.) Who was this well-known female misogynist? How and why did her irrefutable misogyny manifest? Consumed by curiosity, I emailed a friend to ask if he remembered who they were talking about. He told me it was Lisa Yuskavage. Many months later, when Yuskavage picks up the phone at her second home on the North Fork of Long Island, I still cannot decide whether to mention this story.
Though I was never sure how to pronounce her name (which is Lithuanian, and rhymes with ‘savage’), I have known Yuskavage’s paintings since the late 1990s, when the New York-based artist, now 58, was enjoying growing market success and not a little critical notoriety alongside other figurative artists such as Elizabeth Peyton, Rachel Feinstein, Cecily Brown, Inka Essenhigh and John Currin (the odd man out, as a man). Images of Yuskavage’s work often appeared in art-school lectures or books about the complicated condition of third-wave feminism, under the rubric of which heterosexual women were owning their sexuality in a manner once scorned by traditional, academic feminists, and were reclaiming language, imagery and stereotypes that had previously been considered demeaning.