34 Lisa Yuskavage talks to Jonathan Griffin about her paintings of Penthouse pin-ups and why art isn’t about being right or wrong

Lisa Yuskavage is best known for her paintings based on Penthouse pin-ups. But her work is far more complex and compassionate than some critics allow – and besides, as she tells Apollo, she doesn’t make art with morality in mind

Sometime not long ago, before the pandemic rendered such gatherings unconscionable, I met up with a few fellow critics for drinks at a friend’s house. At one point in the evening, during a boisterous discussion about artists’ personal politics, someone casually remarked that so-and-so was ‘definitely a misogynist’, and everyone roundly agreed before cantering on with the conversation.

I didn’t catch the name of the artist to whom they were referring, except that it was that of a woman. The next day, I couldn’t stop wondering about the comment, and about the consensus that had immediately formed in the room. (All present were men.) Who was this well-known female misogynist? How and why did her irrefutable misogyny manifest? Consumed by curiosity, I emailed a friend to ask if he remembered who they were talking about. He told me it was Lisa Yuskavage. Many months later, when Yuskavage picks up the phone at her second home on the North Fork of Long Island, I still cannot decide whether to mention this story.

Though I was never sure how to pronounce her name (which is Lithuanian, and rhymes with ‘savage’), I have known Yuskavage’s paintings since the late 1990s, when the New York-based artist, now 58, was enjoying growing market success and not a little critical notoriety alongside other figurative artists such as Elizabeth Peyton, Rachel Feinstein, Cecily Brown, Inka Essenhigh and John Currin (the odd man out, as a man). Images of Yuskavage’s work often appeared in art-school lectures or books about the complicated condition of third-wave feminism, under the rubric of which heterosexual women were owning their sexuality in a manner once scorned by traditional, academic feminists, and were reclaiming language, imagery and stereotypes that had previously been considered demeaning.

Yuskavage’s paintings, as you also probably know, almost always feature happily naked and amply proportioned female models, often with legs spread and nipples pointing upward at improbable angles (Fig. 4). ‘Girls with women’s bodies […] women with girls’ faces,’ as Helen Molesworth puts it in the catalogue for the artist’s most recent museum show, ‘Wilderness’, which opened at the Aspen Art Museum last year and which travels in a modified form to the Baltimore Museum of Art next month (28 March–19 September). For many, Yuskavage will forever be the artist who used Bob Guccione’s 1970s Penthouse