‘Artist Lisa Yuskavage Had One Rule for Her Show at the Morgan Library: “Never Censor Me”’ by Johanna Fateman
2025
When I catch Lisa Yuskavage by phone a month before the opening of her show at the Morgan Library and Museum, she’s having a pinch-me moment. It’s a little hard for me to believe it’s happening myself: Through January, the illustrious New York institution, renowned for its Old Master drawing collection, will host dozens of the 63-year-old artist’s works on paper, spanning more than three decades.
It’s a perfect–maybe perfectly perverse–context for the figurative painter, famous and infamous for her virtuosic rendering of a queasily beautiful, self-consciously vulgar, and often funny world of desire and desolation. With absinthe or Kool-Aid skies, cadmium sunlight, pastel poly-satin, neon in deep shadow, and girls, girls, girls, Yuskavage tells the story of the nude in Western art like a dream excavation of haunted smut and the interior lives of model-muses–what better foil to her art than the holdings of Pierpont Morgan? (And what better way to cement her place in this centuries-long conversation?)
Read more at Cultured.
