'I'm trying to see if it's possible to hold that tipping moment of perception or have several moments co-exist. Like looking at a memory'. Jenny Saville
Jenny Saville - The Anatomy of Painting, 1
at the National Portrait Gallery, London.
I first saw the work of Saville in Oxford in 2012, and I was immediately a fan. Four years later, there was a small exhibition of some of her work at the Gagosian in London, which I also went to see. So, I was very pleased to be able to see more than 50 of her works at the National Portrait Gallery last year.
One of the most important contemporary artists, a colossus, Saville has played a leading role in the reinvigoration of figurative painting. Her unique ability to create visceral portraits from thick layers of paint reveals an artist with a deep passion for the process itself.
First of all, flesh is the main subject in Saville's work. 'Flesh is all things. Ugly, beautiful, repulsive, compelling, anxious, neurotic, dead, alive', Seville has said. Also: 'I don't give my figures a setting. They are never in a room. There is no narrative. It's flesh, and the paint itself is the body'. What is so striking is the sheer physicality of it: her painting of skin is violent, painful, bruising. 'I have to really work at the tension between getting the paint to have the sensoty quality that I want and be constructive in terms of building the form of stomach for example, or creating the inner crevice of a thigh. I want a painting realism. I try to consider the pace of a painting, of active and quiet areas. In my earlier work my marks were less varied. I think of each mark or areas as having the possibility of carrying a sensation'.
The second point to make about is their size. Her paintings need to be seen 'in the flesh', so to speak. They are huge, overwhelming. Sometimes nine feet tall. Most of them depict the body covering the whole of the canvas and sometimes spilling over the edges and this adds to the drama - her nudes particularly, push towards the viewer rather than being safely contained within the frame of the canvas. So that you are not looking at a body, you are becoming part of that body, that skin. The whole experience becomes overwhelming. 'A large female body has a power; it occupies a physical space, yet there's an anxiety about it. It has to be hidden', she said in an interview.
The size of her paintings is a major departure from convention. Charles Darwent comments that historically, 'one genre of painting that has not by and large lent itself to large-scale treatment has been the female nude. Given the need of male viewers to reinforce their masterly role by looking at things smaller than themselves, oversized pictures of women were clearly a bad idea'. By countering expectations of the genre, Saville is achieving a critique of a time-honoured practice. The large scale of the paintings is empowering the figure depicted and thus challenging perceptions of the female nude as the object of male desire.
Thirdly, a lot of the women Saville paints are nudes. About painting the naked female body, she has said: 'It is hard sometimes. I was a staunch feminist; I still am. So, in those days (the 90s) to paint a female nude was - well, what are you doing? But early on I learnt that I'm most effective when I address something directly. I want to trespass on every area that is a no-go for women, because that'll open it up and make it free'.
Saville should have no qualms about painting the female nude. She is doing so, but differently. Saville has attempted and succeeded in deconstructing female 'nature' as fabricated by patriarchal discourse, seeking to reappropriate the female figure. By shifting the female body's position as an object of male delectation, and thus deconstructing the male fantasy projected for centuries on it, she is able to question the female body's representation throughout art history. As Helen Cixous has stated, in our phallocentric society there lies the necessity to produce the meaning of woman.
The fourth point about her work, is the brushstrokes. Developing her own vocabulary of techniques, by using blurred abstract brushstrokes and layered sculptural marks, Saville creates movement and energy. She describes this as enabling her 'to change the paint with sculptural force' which 'embeds an inner tension and life force to the painting'.
When Saville graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1992, Charles Saatchi purchased the whole of her degree show, erasing her debt, and he asked Saville to make paintings to fill his gallery.
I found the early works which are in this post, much more powerful and I had a much stronger emotional response to them.
Ruben's Flap, 1998-999, (oil on canvas)
Her exaggerated nudes show with an agonising frankness, the disparity between the way women are perceived and the way they feel about their bodies. In her work she visualises her concern about the tyranny wielded over women by the fantasy of the perfect body. By reconstructing the male fantasy about what a woman's body should be, Saville reappropriates this body.
The bodies of her subjects face the viewer with purpose and do not conform to the notion of a passive object to be viewed - they are very much in-your-face. When viewing her paintings, after looking extensively at the subject's body and flesh one is confronted with the subject's gaze, another challenge to conventional representations of the female nude where the 'nude' is an object of entertainment deprived of a thinking mind. 'I paint women as most women see themselves. I try to catch their identity, their skin, their hair, their heat, their leakiness'.
Hyphen is a double portrait of the artist and her sister. Saville used a palette of fleshy pinks to create one, convincing body mass. The paint was applied in large brush strokes and Saville used a scraper to pull the paint up onto the cheek. Areas of raw, stained canvas can be seen within the paint surface, which hint at the explorations of painting she would develop in the following years.
Plan shows a woman marked up for surgery with topographical-like lines. It is hung so that the pubic hair is at eye level. 'In history, pubic hair has always been perfect, painted by men. In real life, it moves around, up your stomach, or down your legs'. Indeed, here, there are dark, shadowy suggestions on the thundering thighs. The impasto paintwork suggests cellulite and the underside of the breasts are squashed and mottled. Standing close, this is not a body, it is map. An expanse of flesh.
Propped, 1992, (oil on canvas)
A challenging picture, giant and shockingly distorted, a lusciously painted nude self-portrait of the artist propped on a stool. When it was first displayed, it was shown opposite a mirror, so that the reverse writing, inscribed across the body, could be read. The text is taken from an essay by the French feminist writer Luce Irigaray: 'If we continue to speak in this sameness - speak as men have spoken for centuries, we will fail each other'.
Stare, 2007-11, (oil on canvas)
The Stare series is derived from a small image of a young woman with a port-wine birthmark on her face, which Saville found in a medical book, and from which she ad libbed into an exploration of painting through colour.
Red Stare Head II, 2007-11, (oil on canvas)
a closer look at those brushstrokes
By working on a large scale, and in layers of paint, Saville imbues the Stare series with a sense of volume and weight that is almost sculptural. Intense darks, pinks, reds and blues emerge through a base of pale skin tones. The landscape of the face is rendered using dynamic brush marks and paint splatters, which at times verge on abstraction while also being highly controlled in building the form. She explains: 'I enjoy making one colour run through another to create multiple nuanced tones - out of making something from nothing'.
Rosetta II, 2005-2006, (oil on paper)
Unlike many of Saville's paintings of heads during this period, the gaze is not directed at the viewer. The artist has commented that she hopes the painting 'calls to mind the classical idea of the mysticism of a blind person's stare' and cities Picasso's painting La Celestina as an influence. She described how she created a sense of movement in the painting: 'I threw tinted primer to make a splash up the right side of her cheek, so when I built the ear to the right of that there was a combination of painting techniques with different dynamics of movement'.
Neck Study II, 2021, (pencil on paper)
Self-Portrait (after Rembrandt), 2019, (oil on paper)
Saville has spoken specifically about the way Rembrandt used the other end of the brush to draw into the paint, and how she learned from him how 'to turn the volume up' at different points in the composition.
And while we were looking at the paintings, another artist was at work...
