Defending Lisa Yuskavage

I have a bad habit of defending the indefensible. So let's get this out of the way: Lisa Yuskavage doesn't need defending, especially from me, for the following reasons.

• I don't especially like her work


• For better or worse, her place in the history of painting over the past 15 years is pretty solid


• She will continue to collect incredible sums of money for her painting

But in a recent article by Jerry Saltz, the New York Magazine art critic calls her work dated and welcomes a new guard into the current mess of the art world. Reviewing her last show, Saltz says it feels "stuck in another time."

Other critics, like David Cohen, focus on the abstract, painterly qualities in Yuskavage's latest work. I think Saltz gets it absolutely right when he catalogs her influences and what the work looks like.

Yuskavage's beanpoles, voluptuaries, and ugly ducklings make it clear that her work is less connected to classical art than to calendar illustration, cheesecake, dirty playing cards, Vargas, and Thomas Kinkade. These aren't meant as insults. Yuskavage's influences also include Hallmark greeting cards, Russ Meyer, the Hudson River School, Maxfield Parrish, seventies Penthouse, Impressionism, third-string Italian masters, and the kind of naturalist kitsch the Nazis liked. This mix is kinkier and more interesting than any discourse about technique and critique.

All these critics seem to miss something. There is a mysterious x factor behind the most interesting paintings because they come by necessity.

Yuskavage always looks like she's on top of her game. Looking at her paintings, one thinks she can technically do anything she wants, which makes her work seem more like a decision than a necessity.

So, seeing work so connected to cheesecake, it seems like a marketing gag. Her work seems like a goof on prurient interest. She's a good painter choosing to work with inflammatory, attention-grabbing images.

That might be the case, I don't know. But I was convinced upon hearing her speak (read my report here) that there's something else happening in these images.

Yuskavage recalled a deep crisis in her painting when, after graduating from Yale, she just couldn't paint. She looked at her work, which showed a deft handling of paint, lights and darks, color, etc., and thought that is sucked. She had no connection to what she was painting, and stopped working for about a year.

Then the bouncy breasts came in.

Yuskavage started painting these ridiculous icons of the uber-feminine. They were cartoons, really, but she felt like she had to paint them.

"I need to do these paintings to breathe," she said, "I know what it's like to make paintings I hated and I almost died."

This is something critics will not understand, but it's something artists know too well. You get to a point where you're deeply involved in a particular imagery and it won't let you go. Is it deep? Is it shallow? It doesn't matter. You have to do it.

That's the most frightening, courageous and stupid thing of all: that your work could mean nothing, and you still have to do it. Because it's yours, but it's also not yours. Something beyond your control compels you.

Abstract painters have it easy in this respect: their imagery is more difficult to pin down. What happens when the deepest recesses of your imagination holds cheesy characters out of '70s Penthouse magazines? Yuskavage takes us there.

One can talk about the meaning of her paintings. They've certainly generated a lot of discussion about the male gaze, feminine experience, etc. But above all, the meanings must be personal. I could talk about how Yuskavage, a middle-aged woman who I believe doesn't have kids, painted a lot of elusive children in her latest show (one was playing in a graveyard). That's personal, but obvious and programmatic. Subject matter and imagery might be our connection to things outside of ourselves, but there's something happening even deeper than that.

None of this is to say she's making great paintings. But I feel the need to point out there's a difference in critical and artistic necessity. The critics will always observe and try to shape historical movements and classifications. The best artists are up to something else, and the best thing I can say about Yuskavage is that she's more of an artist than a critic, no matter her marketing acumen.

Lisa Yuskavage, Pieface, 2008

Lisa Yuskavage, Travellers, 2008