The Verve and Confrontation of Lisa Yuskavage’s Naked Ladies

Starting in the late nineteen-sixties, in her performance-art pieces, Export wielded her own sexual appendages like weapons—keenly and audaciously. In “Action Pants: Genital Panic” (1968), she walked around a movie theatre in crotchless trousers, her naked vulva at the audience’s eye level. (A photograph by the same title, from 1969, shows her wearing the pants, her gaze trained straight on the camera and a machine gun cradled in her arms; a profusion of pubic hair sprouts from between her spread legs as a kind of dare.) In “Tap and Touch Cinema” (1968-71), Export took to the streets of Vienna and other European cities with her bare breasts encased in a curtained-off box, inviting passersby to reach in and have a squeeze, for a brief, strictly measured span of time. Attracting and menacing her viewers in equal measure, she compelled them to engage with her body while also challenging this very engagement. What does it mean to observe women’s bodies, Export asked, whether for edification, or pleasure, or titillation? Might there be something aggressive or wrong about this act of observation, and might we expect the woman being observed to then take this aggression and wrongness and flip it, metabolize it, make it into something altogether new—perhaps, even, into art?

I happened to learn of Export’s death as I was entering Lisa Yuskavage’s new exhibition at the David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea—a coincidence that felt oddly resonant. Though Export’s radical feminist art grew out of a particular political moment that had pretty much passed by the time Yuskavage began her career, the artists nonetheless share a rabble-rousing sensibility and an obsession with the unnerving visual punch of the female body. Yuskavage, who is now in her sixties, began showing her paintings in the nineteen-nineties, and has since become one of the most important—and certainly one of the most successful—American figurative painters working today. Still, her art wasn’t always considered a shoo-in for the contemporary canon. In a Profile of Yuskavage, published in this magazine in 2023, my colleague Ariel Levy traced the artist’s struggle in the earlier years of her career to gain recognition for her work, largely because of the trickiness of her perennial subject matter, which Levy defined as “a particular kind of naked lady.”

“Endless Studio (Portal),” 2025.Art work © Lisa Yuskavage / Courtesy the artist and David ZwirnerThe history of art is littered with naked ladies, of course, from Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” to Ingres’s “Grande Odalisque” to Picasso’s “Nude Woman in a Red Armchair,” but Yuskavage’s ladies are, indeed, of a particular kind, and could quite easily be taken for what the artist’s husband, Matvey Levenstein, jokingly called “stroke material for the patriarchy,” in Levy’s Profile. Nude or near-nude, pert or pendulous of breast and bare or near-bare of pudendum, these women—rendered with great verve and skill, mostly in oils, but, occasionally, in pastels, graphite, collage, or watercolor—are sexy in a pornographic, girly-mag sort of way. (To characterize her figures further, my above use of “breast” and “pudendum” could and perhaps should have been swapped out for “tit” and “pussy,” the more appropriate terms here.) These women are the sloe-eyed Penthouse Pets and ditzy “Laugh-In” go-go dancers and buxom and bouffant Little Annie Fannies that Gen X-ers like myself would catch startling, enticing glimpses of as children when we thought the adults weren’t looking. Depicted as tropes rather than as subjects, the women in Yuskavage’s paintings have always reminded me of an old magazine interview with Courtney Love, in which she described her days as a stripper in Los Angeles in the eighties, before she made it as a musician, and explained the conventional economics of the whole endeavor. “If you even try and slip a little of yourself in there you won’t make any money,” she cautioned. “You’ve got to have white pumps, pink bikini, fuckin’ hairpiece, pink lipstick. Gold and tan and white.”