Lisa Yuskavage

Boesky & Callery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1996

New York, Boesky & Callery, Lisa Yuskavage, 1996

This work is in very good condition overall. The canvas is unlined. There is some minor wear around the turning edges, with a few associated hairline cracks. Unframed.
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Lisa Yuskavage is renowned for her painterly canvases reminiscent in technique of Renaissance masters and European painters of the 17^th century. Although the cherubic faces of Michelangelo and chiaroscuro of Rembrandt certainly inform her style, the subject matter of her work occupies a more contemporary niche. Her most recognizable works are of strange yet tantalizing nudes originally inspired by the men’s pleasure magazines she secretly perused with her girlfriends during her youth. Since those teenage years, Yuskavage has developed to create art as a way to express and release her deepest insecurities, such as dealing with femininity and the male gaze.  As Yuskavage continues to develop her work she has been able to paint in her distinctive style, yet almost with a different persona, encapsulating a viewpoint that has evolved from her earlier work.  
   Such is the case in The Feminist Husband. Yuskavage paints a male subject submerged in a Baroque darkness and dressed in modern day garb in the same rich painting style she would her female nudes. However, she opts to clothe him in a non-fantastical setting; a world very different from the ones surrounding her nymph-like females. This husband is staid, reserved, and fosters the tension that Yuskavage attempts to release through her paintings featuring female subjects. His melancholy expression divulges that he is in some way tormented, perhaps by a woman or through his own repression.    
   While Yuskavage exploits all of the wrongness and contradiction of the male gaze through the subjects of many of her other works, here she expresses sympathy for this figure. Whether the artist's intention is for us to see this husband as pathetic or wounded is a quest the viewer, much like Yuskavage, must explore on his or her own. Yuskavage herself has said that her work is more empathetic than ironic, much like in her works depicting women, however, there is a fine line in determining whether or not this suit-wearing man is a true feminist, or if in fact the title of the work is an ironic comment on his misogyny.  
   Part of the genius of Yuskavage is that her work occupies a wide sphere of irony and a complex intertwining of various personas and perspectives. The Feminist Husband and the smaller study for the work titled Pussywhipped adds a new dimension to her body of work, which is often wild and shameless portrayals of female nudes. Yuskavage constantly reiterates that painting is fiction and this painting, much like one of the artist’s favorite works The Tempest by Giorgione, “is like a dream, you don’t know why but it’s compelling.”