Julia Margaret Cameron, I Wait, 1872, albumen print © The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A, acquired with the generous assistance of the National Lottery Heritage Fund and Art Fund.
Sweating through another July weekend with nothing to do and most galleries in their summer hours (because they hate us poors stuck in the NYC swamps in the summer), Emily Colucci and Jessica Almereyda struggled through multiple emails and sign-up forms to get press tickets to the Morgan Library & Museum to see their trio of white lady exhibitions. So they had a conversation about it:
Emily: We both agree that Lisa Yuskavage isn’t exactly either of our favorite artists, but somehow, out of all the museum shows in New York at the moment, Yuskavage’s imaginatively titled Drawings exhibition was the one that called to us on a holiday weekend when the only options were museums. Recently, I’ve had a couple of conversations with artists in which they sang her praises, so I felt like maybe it’s time to take another look. Her round tits and ass paintings have always seemed a bit one-note to me. I mean, how many naked ladies in colorful foggy, wispy environments can you look at before you’re bored to tears? Even for an avowed filth supporter like me, there is a limit to enjoyment. Did I find a new love for Yuskavage’s work here in this show?
Not exactly. First off, the show was surprisingly small, akin to a small gallery show rather than an expansive museum exhibition. I was glad we didn’t fork over the entry fee, but instead, asked for press tickets, which was its own fiasco. The museum’s press liaison initially shoved us off to fill out a ticket form, presumably to autistically avoid having to tell us, “No. You are nobodies who don’t work for The New York Times.” Then, she confirmed…well, nothing when you emailed a few days later. The visitor services person, when we arrived and were not on the “list,” seemed appropriately exhausted by museum bureaucracy. I hear you, honey! I don’t understand why so many underpaid museum workers act like enthusiastic gatekeepers. Do your job worse! There’s no award at the end of this!
Ahem…anyway, the smallness of the show didn’t exactly provide a comprehensive overview of Yuskavage’s work, but maybe there’s not one to be had. The exhibit presented several different series, which frankly, all looked the same to me. The one outlier was my favorite: the early series of Tit Heaven watercolors, which left much more to the imagination – tits and tongues jutting out of mountains, sunset skies, and other hazy environments. I particularly liked the one with the pointy tongue licking an even pointier nipple projected on a Twin Peaks-esque pine forest. This series is also thrillingly kitsch and reminds me of a horny–or, well, hornier–Fragonard with a dash of Thomas Kinkade (which the Smithsonian, given the recent post by ICE Barbie Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security, seems to be gearing up for a retrospective). It’s also much more sensual than the other works, which ended up blurring together in an endless parade of busty Kewpie Dolls. And yes, I know anti-eroticism is Yuskavage’s jam, but even edging gets boring after a while. Still, there were a few that stood out there too, like the side boob on Ass Checker and the almost mechanical white on black paper pastel, All’s I Gots Are Big Boobs. Did Drawings give you a new view of Yuskavage?
Installation view of Lisa Yuskavage: Drawings, Thaw Gallery, June 27, 2025, through January 4, 2026, The Morgan Library & Museum, Photography by Janny Chiu, 2025. Artwork © Lisa Yuskavage. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
Jessica: While we can all probably acknowledge Yuskavage is technically skilled, I’ve never been drawn to her bloated, bubble-bosomed figures and that sordid post-anime style, so this mini-retrospective presentation confirmed my assumptions, mostly. Yuskavage leans into the photographer Sally Mann in a way; here are these naked girls, only in Mann’s portraits of her nude children, there’s a distinct, unabashed confidence and defiance. Yuskavage’s faces are effaced in a fuzzy haze. The eyes are buttons. They’re somewhat spooky but not exactly uncanny — they’re these pseudo-menacing mannequins. The breasts are more expressive than any other body part, and her breasts are at their best when they’re blobs plonked on a table. I’m not a fan of her palette, nor her favorite color — acid green. It reminds me of toxic sludge that you see in gutters from time to time. I don’t want that color hung on my wall, so just as well these pictures are beyond my price range ($0-$30). Also, how many meta-portraits situated in artist studios do we need — it’s like movies made about movies — you only need a few good ones, and those go a long way. At least, bring some more ghoul and more weirdness to the studio if you’re gonna take us there. Also-also, there’s only so much room to move in that small boxy space, and we were both miffed by this guy in there who had, let’s say, zero self-awareness and kept hovering around us to look at the same pictures, which is so off-putting when that happens. Can ya just wait your turn, dude? And you, any peeves?
Emily: I, too, have a peeve about boomer museum visitors in doofy bucket hats that pretend not to see women. He treated us as if we were ghosts or strange creatures in the mist, kind of like the women in the drawings! But if we’re talking about exhibitions, another peeve is overstated wall labels, and Drawings certainly had a few that were guilty of egregious crimes against art writing. The one that I’m still baffled by was the description of Bad Babies as “distinctly working class.” Then, looking at these pencil drawings, they’re just more of the same of Yuskavage’s anime-adjacent style. Which of those four drawings is working class? Is it the one’s swirly little bush? Is that poor? There was also a baffling quote by Jarrett Earnest talking about Yuskavage “being an empath.” Ok, dude, sure.
Jessica: Mhm. What surprised me was to read about her influences, like Fassbinder… huh? Her women don’t resemble his striking star femmes (Barbara Valentin, Hanna Schygulla, etc). If anything, these images might have provided moodboard fodder for Emerald Fennell’s not-good movie Promising Young Woman with Carey Mulligan’s cute, bouncy nose and the tacky color palette. Maybe I just haven’t seen enough Yuskavage to have a fuller picture to make a fairer assessment, this was just a taste of booby shaped candy, really…
Installation view of Lisa Yuskavage: Drawings, Thaw Gallery, June 27, 2025 through January 4, 2026, The Morgan Library & Museum, Photography by Janny Chiu, 2025. Artwork © Lisa Yuskavage. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
Emily: It was, which is why I have nothing else to say about it. The reason Yuskavage got shoved in that itsy-bitsy space in the first-floor hallway was because the larger exhibition spaces were devoted to two other white ladies: Jane Austen’s bored-to-tears 250th birthday celebration, A Lively Mind, and moony, moody Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron’s Arresting Beauty. Starting with the former, the Jane Austen show was predictably much more slammed with visitors than the Yuskavage, making it pretty much impossible to take in the many, many jam-packed letters, journals, books, and other written materials, often scrawled with Austen’s tight, little, impenetrable penmanship. I was going a lot faster than you; I appreciate Austen and read a lot of the books in high school, but not much that was on view grabbed my attention. Certainly not that drab brown Austen dress, which was one of the only things that offered a bit of visual respite from the endless paper trail. On that, I kept getting frustrated by trying to read or digest all the writing on view. The only one that caught my eye was a sheet of paper on which Austen wrote a synopsis of a novel made entirely out of bad ideas that people told her she should write. How delightfully bitter! The only problem was that I could not decipher Austen’s scribble at all, so I couldn’t read it. All I could gather was what was written on the label. At least include a translation! The other part I enjoyed was within a short section about Austen’s North American fans, which included a library book rife with vintage vandalism, including a breakdown of these readers’ opinions on all the characters. You took some more time than I did while I milled about, wondering what certain inclusions had to do with, well, anything.
Jessica: I may have taken more time to squint at a lot of illegible writing, but I didn’t feel any more enlightened than you. The Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature exhibit the Morgan put on last year, and the Emily Dickinson exhibit from several years back, were both so superbly curated and so vivid that this show felt uninspired by comparison. I’m with you, a bit more scribble-to-wall-label transcription would’ve helped. My main takeaway was that poor Jane couldn’t make a living off her talent on her own, not that it was much of a hindrance, since one of her brothers, Edward, was adopted by a wealthy childless couple and became the inheritor of their estates, providing his widowed mother and sisters with Chawton Cottage. Jane had enough security to get by with her non-lucrative writing and a very tight bond with her sister Cassandra, who drew an unflattering, frumpy portrait of a rosy-cheeked Jane with her arms folded and her eyes looking away. That cloak-dress you mentioned didn’t need a screen next to it showing how it moved. It was oddly dumbed down in some areas, and needed more baking in others. And the projection of Austen’s gravestone inscription on the floor, so that you’re forced to walk on it to pass through to the next room, was another odd choice.
Installation view of A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250, Morgan Stanley West Gallery. © The Morgan Library & Museum, Photography by Janny Chiu, 2025.
Emily: What WAS with that grave projection?! It also bunched up the exhibition traffic as everyone tried to read her mundane epitaph. The show seemed almost stubbornly and misanthropically committed to not being interesting. Because it’s the Morgan, much of the latter third of the show concerned acquisitions and Austen’s biggest collector and fan. Sure, that included a ghoulish lock of hair, which always tickles my fancy, and surprised me how blonde Austen was. But ultimately, most people who go to that show are not going to be blown away by dry discussions of provenance. We were talking about how there have been so many wonderful period movie adaptations of Austen’s work, and they’re all great! Why not have some screens playing clips to add some life to the show?! There have also been a lot of contemporary adaptations: HELLO! CLUELESS?!!
Jessica: That was a big disappointment – to see no acknowledgment of the pitch-perfect adaptations, both period and contemporary, that keep Austen alive and relevant. A high school assignment for me was to write an essay on Clueless and Emma, and so I know that marvelous movie word for word… You don’t understand! This is an Alaia!!
Amy Sherald (b. 1973), A Single Man in Possession of a Good Fortune, 2019, Oil on canvas, Collection of Lizbeth and George Krupp © Amy Sherald. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Joseph Hyde
Emily: Aw, as far as I recall, we didn’t have fun Jane Austen assignments. Plus, Austen never captivated me as much as the Kenneth Branagh marathon version of Hamlet, which occupied much of my high school mind and inside jokes with my nerdy friends. But that’s a subject for a whole other article…Returning to Austen, I had to save this for last: the only attempt at relevancy in the show was the concluding shoved-in Amy Sherald painting of a solo Black man in a brightly colored, slightly more restrained Cosby sweater. I noticed the painting before we even entered the bulk of the show, as I overheard a docent talking about Michelle Obama and peeked around the corner and noticed THAT. What is this painting doing in that show? What in the world does it have to do with Jane Austen? Well, when we finally got to the end, the answer found on the label was that the painting’s title is a quote from Pride and Prejudice, “A single man in possession of a good fortune.” This seemed like a reach. It was as if the museum looked at their summer show roster and thought, Oh fuck, this is really fucking white. And it is! You can’t get any whiter than Jane Austen! It’s impossible, which made this inclusion seem very curatorially cynical to me. And to others. I would be remiss if I didn’t include our interaction with two tiny older women who turned to us as we were near the painting and asked, “You’re young, what do you think of this?” I said, “I don’t think it makes any sense here,” and affirmed their beliefs!
Jessica: I enjoyed those women asking our opinion, though we were just as baffled as they were… At the very least, put a portrait of Cher (Horowitz) next to the Sherald, have some fun with it, though, who has that anymore? If you’re going to have a nod to contemporary influence, you have to present a group, even if small…
Emily: It was just stuffed in there next to a wall of Austen book covers from around the world! Speaking of books and missed opportunities for relevancy, why didn’t the Julia Margaret Cameron exhibition mention that the only reason some of us know her photography is because Nick Cave included one of her photos on the cover of his novel And the Ass Saw the Angel?!!!! Excuse me! A perfect opportunity for an NC namecheck! And of course, Nick would be into Cameron’s photography, particularly her romantically staged biblical scenes based on Medieval and Renaissance paintings. Unsurprisingly, I, too, loved those the best! My favorite was I Wait, a disgruntled little cupid with her head resting on her crossed arms. She’s supposed to mirror the Fiorucci cupids, aka the ones at the bottom of Raphael’s The Sistine Madonna, but to me, it looks like a print you’d buy in a Hallmark store next to Precious Moments figurines. I can just imagine it hung on a suburban wall next to a framed print that reads, “Bless this Mess.” It’s utter kitsch and I love it so much. The adjacent A Study for a Holy Family also treads the line between fine art and tack with the child with the thousand-yard stare gripping onto a palm cross, but it’s not quite as transcendently cloying Christian schmaltz.
As a whole, though, I got tired of Cameron’s photography pretty quickly. The work is, undeniably gorgeous. Perhaps even too gorgeous. Pretty ladies with that long, wavy Pre-Raphaelite hair. Stock brokers she made look like tortured monks. Hell, even Darwin looked good. Yet, after a few rooms, it was all the same poses, all the same yearning eyes, all the same thick hair. We get it, Julia! Then, there were the concluding “empathetic” aka uncomfortable colonial Brit-brained portraits of Sri Lankans, which I was going to complain about here until I realized I just don’t care enough to make that tired “woke” argument. Fuck it. Let the old Victorian white lady take her colonial photos. Her story, though, may have been more interesting than some of the work, like picking up a camera at 48 (we still have time!), as well as her surprising relationships with her great niece, Virginia Woolf, and her neighbor, Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
Julia Margaret Cameron, The Astronomer John Frederick William Herschel, 1867, albumen print © The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A, acquired with the generous assistance of the National Lottery Heritage Fund and Art Fund
Jessica: Cameron objectifies her subjects somewhat equally with her beauty-extracting, ethereal lens. At least she didn’t attempt any whimsical Madonna-child cosplay in Sri Lanka, opting for compositions that seem more reserved than intimate and empathic. The peasant women seem strikingly self-possessed compared to the meek, contrived portraits Cameron took of women she had a longer-term rapport with to indulge in fantasy. The exhibit as a whole served up a sort of “who’s who” of nineteenth-century Victorian society. The notion of a photographer taking up her craft in middle age (yes indeed–it’s not too late for us to manifest our talents!) and shooting her strongest portraits of now-mythic men in her converted chicken coup studio, and the commitment to one medium alone, are novel, particularly in our interdisciplinary/praxified times. Cameron’s fixation on beauty, and her little theory that “no woman must be photographed between the ages of eighteen and seventy” (ahem, to my mind women who naturally age get more interesting to look at when they hit the 30-year mark and beyond…) left me hankering to cleanse my gaze of her hazy pious displays on something profane. The obsession with pretty does get pretty monotonous. Nevertheless, she does cast a spell. Her world-weary men are especially enchanting, such as the forlorn-looking violinist, Hungarian-born Joseph Joachim. And I also admired Cameron’s use of her maid-muse Mary Ryan, whom Cameron discovered/scouted as a beggar in the streets. It’s a classic rags-to-riches, rescued from poverty trajectory you can follow within the exhibit, where we see her as a mythic nymph with wildly long bed hair, attracting the attention of a well-to-do and equally visually appealing Henry Cotton, who would marry her a month after Cameron’s Browning’s Sordello,1867 was taken, where Ryan reappears apparition-like and matronly beside her future husband and cherubic child.
That Ass Saw Nick Cave cover image also graces the cover of a 1985 MoMA catalogue of Cameron’s work — photography in the collection of Paul F Walter. In another catalogue, Looking at Photographs from a collection of 100 photographs from 1973, then-Director of Photography John Szarkowski wrote about Cameron’s portraits of such biblical heroines:
“These pictures by Cameron have become something of an embarrassment to her most sympathetic critics during the past generation, a period when photography has seemed ill-adapted to the functions of fiction. Nevertheless, the picture opposite [Madonna With Children c 1866], admittedly one of the less insistently anecdotal of her allegorical works–seems today a splendid picture: strongly constructed, well described, and more important, strangely moving. The three models are very beautiful, and if the central figure was in fact a teen-aged virgin, she became, for the minutes during which this picture was made, a most persuasive donna.”
Emily: That’s very effusive. I maintain that Cameron’s biblical work is best understood as kitsch, which I realize is antithetical to the museum canonization of every artist they touch and quite possibly sacrilegious, too. A multi-anti-institutional pose that gets my juices going!
Jessica: I suspected that reading would be too gush for you, and I see it both ways; those portraits are both endearingly earnest and totally syrupy-sentimental.
Emily: Do we even dare talk about the tippy-top new acquisition exhibition? I honestly can’t remember much of what I saw other than that ghastly photograph of all the animals shoved in jars and the delightfully disturbed single leaf from an illuminated manuscript showing a pinpricked bloody host/Jesus wafer. I’ll take two!
Emily Poe-lucci! (photo by Jessica Almereyda)
Jessica: Yeah, we were mostly too exhausted to absorb new information by that point. I love this picture I took with your head superimposed on the famous “Annie Daguerreotype,” which Edgar Allen Poe gave to Annie L. Richmond, an admirer of his work and his lover, and one of the last photographs he sat for before his death by alcoholism at age 40. A lame, slapdash Schnabel was hanging near the entryway, redeemed slightly by a cosmic Lee Bontecou acquisition nearby. Rosamond Purcell’s The Uncurated Jar seems a perfect image for us to finish on. That’s how the brain-melt felt after taking everything in: a little too squished and compressed for comfort.
Emily: The Uncurated Jar represents how I feel in NYC during the summer: wet and smushed, usually next to my other fellow revolting critters.