When Bad Art Goes Good
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

What happens when a “bad” painter gets better? Is “better” better or worse?
Lovers and haters of Lisa Yuskavage alike ought to be confounded with her new body of work, seen uptown and downtown at Zwirner & Wirth and David Zwirner galleries. To those for whom the golden girl of bad painting can force no extremity of tackiness and distortion too far, her images of sisterly lesbian tenderness must seem like a capitulation to (relatively) safe taste. Whereas for former detractors like myself — long dismissive of, and repulsed by, the sheer ugliness and ineptitude of her work — a newfound poignancy is giving pause for thought.
Don’t get me wrong: These are still slick, silly pictures fusing the aesthetics of Hallmark cards and the knowing rhetoric of the graduate school seminar. Ms. Yuskavage rose to meteoric art-world attention fresh from Yale where her classmate (if not soulmate) was John Currin. Both artists exploit caricature to the hilt, debasing the body, usually female, to grotesque, mannerist extremes. Ms. Yuskavage specialized in abject exaggerations of breasts and buttocks. Her figures would be placed within sickly-colored artificial spaces that seemed like a cross between Japanese anime and a Francis Bacon interior.
Routinely, critics castigated her content but conceded to her “Old Masterly” technique. This was infuriating on two counts. Firstly, her technique was really nothing special. It derived from mid-20th-century how-to manuals, full of hackneyed shortcuts and splashy effects. Secondly, it promoted the idea that touch and vision are separate entities: You have an idea, you execute it. Whereas the whole glory of Old Master painting is the inventive subversion of received means to get across new visions and sensations.
It’s not that Ms. Yuskavage has changed enormously since her last New York show, at Marianne Boesky in 2003. She still loves saccharine color, squidgy paint, silken fluency, erotic lighting, and disengaged flourishes of the brush. And it isn’t just that she has improved in her delivery of these tricks. Some mockery and absurdity are still there, but their focus has shifted from the women in the pictures to the viewer, and the maker.
There are still plenty of fat women, but there is no longer the cruel humor of the saucy postcard. Instead, pregnant women are juxtaposed with effulgent fruit in “Nana” (2004), for instance. The women are still prone to “white trash” turned-up noses and spaced out facial expressions, but in new narratives of amorous interaction and frolic there are intimations of genuine inner thought, of two independent people in a relationship.
Toning down her misogyny is not just a moral achievement but a painterly one, too. Hitherto, painterliness was a kind of bonus, or consolation prize, added to an already formulated graphic image. But now, the way paint goes down feels at one with the image. Tenderness, absorption, and feelings of ambiguity are shared by the vulnerable young women in the paintings and the invested artist bringing them to life.
But if “Nana” is supposed to recall the heroine of Zola’s novel, we will remember her as “the flea in the palace” and wonder again about Ms. Yuskavage’s relationship to the Old Masters.
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While Ms. Yuskavage still has at least one foot firmly planted in the camp camp, then David Fertig is a painter of unassailable earnestness. He is a genuine fogey in subject and style alike. He paints Napoleonic battle scenes and military personalities with fastidious historic exactitude as far as uniforms, regalia, and fuselage are concerned. His shows attract readers of Patrick O’Brien and C.S. Forester who aren’t necessarily art aficionados: It was heartening on a visit to the gallery to watch two young boys appreciatively pointing out military minutiae to their dad.
Until now, the great artistic virtue of Mr. Fertig’s work has been the period authenticity of his painterliness. Rather like historic revivalists of Baroque music, playing on period instruments and researching historic techniques, Mr. Fertig broached the romance of the Napoleonic wars a touch to recall Delacroix, Gericault, or Turner. He always worked small, and that continues to give images in this show like “The Boat From the Pickle” (2006) or the equestrian portrait of a general riding on a beach in “1793” (2006) an awkward urgency, a sense of dash appropriate to handsome men caught in conflict. Painterly smudge gives images like “Frolic and the Wasp” (2006), a sea battle, or “Waterloo” (2006) some sense of the fog of war. You can almost hear the artist exclaiming battle noises as the brushstrokes hit the canvas.
The problem in this show is that, in a bid to increase his scale, Mr. Fertig has adopted some anachronistically 20th-century techniques. The 4-foothigh portrait “Jean-Baptiste de Marbot” (2006) has lots of mechanical palette knife scraping that recalls salon abstraction of the 1950s. It is rather like listening to a Handel concerto and suddenly one movement is played on a brass band. You are dying to turn down the volume — or fast forward.
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Enoc Pérez is another painter who has moved “up” in various ways, with happier results.
The Puerto Rican–born painter, who recently joined Mitchell-Innes & Nash after showing at the more cutting edge Elizabeth Dee, has traded small paintings of Deco colonial hotels in wistful decay in a style that recalled Sickert and Luc Tuymans to monumental “portraits” of signature modernist buildings in New York City.
His show is a pantheon of heroic postwar skyscrapers: Lever House, the Seagram Building, Met Life, the United Nations, the TWA Terminal at John F. Kennedy Airport. These canvases are generally over 8 feet high, and show the buildings in situ though depopulated. They look to be based on architectural photographs of the period of their completion.
They are painted with carefully modulated, generally dry brushstrokes with passages of artful smudge and drip that, with intimations of the artist’s hand, cause the surfaces to shimmer. The painstaking accuracy and sumptuous scale invest the works with grandeur. But this is mitigated by a subdued palette, loving detail, and tender restraint that imbue the works with a melancholy familiar from his earlier, Caribbean images. This sense of fragility is all the more eerie when applied to a metropolis at its imperial peak.
Yuskavage until November 18 (525 W. 19th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-727-2070; 32 E. 69th St., between Park and Madison avenues, 212-517-8677);
Fertig until November 11 (1014 Madison Ave., between 78th and 79th streets, 212-535-5767);
Pérez until November 25 (534 W. 26th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-744-7400).