Bodies of Work

Lisa Yuskavage's art shows it all

- By Ariel Levy

Thirty years ago, when Lisa Yuskavage and Matvey Levenstein were young painters trying to establish themselves in the East Village, they got a message on their answering machine. An acquaintance who had invited the couple to a party wanted to let them know that people felt Yuskavage was “too much,” and that, on second thought, they’d rather she didn’t come.

Yuskavage was already depressed. She’d recently had her f irst gallery show—abstracted depictions of women folded over like swollen seashells, painted in what she later called “dark, slimy” colors. “I walked into that opening and I absolutely hated the show,” she recalled recently. “I wanted to take it all down and get out of there.” She confessed her dismay to the painter John Currin, a former classmate at the Yale School of Art, and he empathized. “They’re beautiful and everything, but it’s not you,” he said. The paintings were quiet, understated, unobjectionable. Yuskavage is not. People called her the Lenny Bruce of Yale because of her bawdy sense of humor. Now sixty-one, she described one art dealer to me as the kind of person who would “suck your pussy so hard it’d make your nose bleed.”