Interior: Big Blonde with Beaded Jacket (1997)
Honeymoon (1998)
True Blonde Draped (1999)
| The exhibition catalogue features an introduction by the show's curator, ICA Director Claudia Gould, and essays by Katy Siegel, Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art History and Criticism at Hunter College, CUNY, and frequent contributor to Artforum, and Marcia B. Hall, Professor of Art History at Temple University. | Institute
of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia Dec. 2, 2000-Feb. 4, 2001 ICA is pleased to present Lisa Yuskavage's first solo museum exhibition, focusing upon recent and past works. A native of Philadelphia and graduate of Tyler School of Art and Yale, Yuskavage creates images that simultaneously embrace and undermine traditional and formalistic painting methodology. |
Looking at Yuskavage's paintings, I am reminded of the way I feel about America when I return home after living abroad. I am overwhelmed by the lush fecundity the license, the writ too largeness, the abrasive vulgarity. The finesse of Yuskavage's paintings is her rejoinder to these qualities in our culture. Her corrective to too much too fast too big is to make pictures at a rate of five or six a year that aspire to rival the great masters. Thoughtful, scrupulously prepared, exquisitely painted, they ask to be regarded with the same kind of attention as the masterpieces of the grand tradition from which she has learned.
With her technique, she makes it clear that craftsmanship is as important to her as to any painter of the Renaissance. She prepares a composition with numerous drawings, in the same way as the masters in the academic tradition. There is nothing of the accidental or spontaneous in her final product, and, with this evident premeditation, she opens the ironic gap between her ignoble actors and her noble treatment of them. As part of her laborious preparation, in imitation of sixteenth-century painters like Jacopo Tintoretto, Yuskavage makes three-dimensional models of her figures. We are told that Tintoretto made clay figures and then placed them on a little stage, where he could adjust the lighting and study them from various angles and in relation to the other figures in a composition. In fact, the Venetian probably learned this technique in central Italy from his hero, Michelangelo. When he needed to design some four hundred poses for the Sistine Lost Judgment, Michelangelo created small wax figures that he could warm in hot water and mold into the desired poses. He could then study them in various lights. This technique obviated the need for studies of the live model, and when those figures were painted, he could reshape and reuse the figurines. Yuskavage makes her maquettes of cast hydrocal, and they are larger than I imagine Tintoretto's or Michelangelo's to have been (but who knows? None has survived). She, too, uses them to study light: "to get 'real' light," she says. She discovered that when Thomas Hart Benton used maquettes, he had his model take the pose of the sculpture, so she has included this step in her process. She photographs the models; then, she may draw from the photo in ink, or pencil, or pastel. The use of photographs seems to me to help her get the right distance. She does not want immediacy, only the illusion of immediacy Sometimes, she is inspired by Degas to make monoprints. There are examples in the exhibition of all these paths to the finished work. And we can see that there are even times when the study becomes the finished work.
Light for Yuskavage is alchemical. Like her great Venetian forebears, she finds in light the power to transform the visual image, to imbue it with mood. Like Lisa, who wanted to reproduce here Giovanni Bellini's San Zaccaria altarpiece, I, too, find it a very moving piece, because of its light. (…)
Big Little Laura
(1997-98)
In some of her
recent pictures, Yuskavage has moved away from innocence
and pastels. Interior: Big Blonde with Beaded Jacket
(1997) is darker, in every sense, than her sisters. There
is a calculation in her erotic self-presentation that is
not mindless, and is, therefore, more sinister. The
self-consciousness of Honeymoon (1998) is of a different
sort. The artist has created a setting of mysterious
mountains, moonlight, transparent drapery, and voluptuous
nymph all rendered with the airbrushed perfection of a
soft-porn magazine. As the artist steps back to get her
accustomed distance, she exposes the clichés of the
"romantic" image, removing the scene from the
actual with anatomical exaggerations and distortions.
True Blonde (1999) poses erotically, but covers her
crotch with her hands. Is she concealing her pudenda, or
playing with herself? Her lowered eyes show us a sadder,
more introspective, side to the woman who accepts her
role as sex symbol, but yearns for something more real.
True Blonde Draped (1999) gives us a still more poignant
and more unguarded view of her. She looks out at us with
a self-awareness we have not seen before. Her face,
particularly her eyes, are shadowed, giving her more age,
more consciousness. Significantly, her lower body is
draped, and this time, unmistakably, her hands are
clasped protectively over her crotch. She is a woman
endowed with the attributes of sexual allure blond hair
and huge breasts-but they seem to be, for her, more a
heavy burden than a useful weapon. She is a poignant
portrait of a woman who longs to be taken as a person and
not as a sexual object, but the postcoital air suggests
that she is trapped in a role she does not know how to
escape.
Lisa Yuskavage wants seriously to paint. She believes in
the transforming beauty of pignient suspended in oil on
canvas, and the ability of that beauty to suggest
transcendence. She paints the shallow, the vulgar, the
heedless as if it were profound, elegant, meditative,
thereby reminding us obliquely of the absence of these
qualities and the enduring possibility of their
renascence.
From
the essays by Claudia Gould "Screwing it on
straight"
True Blonde
(1999)
more books by lisa yuskavage