{"id":379542,"date":"2025-08-28T05:35:15","date_gmt":"2025-08-28T05:35:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/379542\/"},"modified":"2025-08-28T05:35:15","modified_gmt":"2025-08-28T05:35:15","slug":"is-jenny-saville-the-uks-greatest-living-painter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/379542\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Jenny Saville the UK\u2019s Greatest Living Painter?"},"content":{"rendered":"

LONDON \u2014 Of all the YBAs<\/a> (Young British Artists) of the 1990s \u2014 including upstarts like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, mouthing off petulantly to the art establishment with dead livestock and unmade beds \u2014 it is Jenny Saville who has been most entrenched in the history of art. It is also Saville who can most convincingly claim to be Britain\u2019s greatest living painter since the death of Lucien Freud (sorry, David Hockney). The artist\u2019s superb draughtsmanship skills, informed by absorption and understanding of the Old Masters, are combined with a painterly technique that manipulates its plasticity for all its worth. (Ironically, Tracey Emin is a professor of drawing at the Royal Academy despite having no capacity for drawing.) Saville\u2019s style is as complete and significant as that of Freud.<\/p>\n

It is hard to overestimate the impact of Saville\u2019s early works on British contemporary painting. Her paintings often disappear into the most discerning private ownership. Those in public collections are the rare anomaly in her current survey, The Anatomy of Painting<\/a>, at the National Portrait Gallery. As a result, some of that impact is recreated for those viewing her art for the first time. Enormous in scale, her uncomfortably close cropped depictions of women\u2019s faces and nude bodies abound in the joy of painterly modeling, from bare \u2014 nude \u2014 patches of canvas to her swift, thick, viscous slathers, to dappled dry brush blends. The large scale alone may shock people accustomed to viewing only reproductions on screen. The distribution of muted and contrasting tones is sophisticated. In short, there is a wealth of virtuosic brushwork to drink in.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\t\tJenny Saville, \u201cFigure 11.23\u201d (1997), oil on canvas<\/p>\n

Considering the painterly bombast, it is perhaps a pedantic complaint that the National Portrait Gallery has mounted an exhibition that has not a single \u201cportrait\u201d in it. We are given only a few of the sitters\u2019 identities, and neither the museum nor Saville expound any particular reason for portraying them, nor any painter-sitter relationships to speak of. Hers is an academic interest with only perfunctory gestures toward body image issues, and pieces explicitly covering gender identity<\/a> are absent. In \u201cPlan\u201d (1993), one of the exhibition\u2019s key works, Saville contours the nude flesh like ordinance survey map terrain, while \u201cRuben\u2019s Flap\u201d (1998\u201399) references the fleshy folds favored by the Dutch master, updated to the \u201creal\u201d folds of contemporary unidealized body types. In her most color-saturated rendering of flesh, \u201cFigure 11.23\u201d (1997), she deploys flat red more in the Renaissance discipline of cangiante<\/a> \u2013 using depth of color rather than muted tones for shade \u2013 rather than realistically depicting blood.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Similarly, a fantastic sequence of mother and child images that reference both Pietas and Maestas from Michelangelo, with bulbous children bending toward us, entasis-style, echo distinctly his Madonna of Bruges or the soft sfumato of Raphael, reimagined in colored pencil. Saville fails, though, to wear her influences on her sleeve when channeling her love for de Kooning into her compositions from the mid to late 2010s. Her attempts to break down nudes into intertwining layers of limbs and squiggles, shattering them with de Kooning-like surface articulation, feel forced, and obscure her gift for three-dimensional modeling. \u201cOut of one, two (symposium)\u201d (2016) nods to Cy Twombly simply by overlaying the nude figures with scribbles. Her academic attempts at abstraction \u2014 the opposite of Renaissance Old Master figure modeling \u2014 seem to be at the expense of her work\u2019s soul.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Arguably, it is the conventional \u201cportraits\u201d \u2014 simply framed faces, rendered on an enormous scale \u2014 that are strangely anaemic (notice duplications of the same portrait with varying degrees of effort) and, more recently, louder in tone yet quieter in effect. The final room should be renamed \u201crainbow filter,\u201d for here the palette is split into the entire spectrum, as rainbows are projected onto the visages, rather like a social media filter. For all the power of her early work, perhaps the oversaturated digital world demands that she dial her painterly tropes to eleven to stay relevant: colors are unnaturally zingy; oil sticks are deployed in vigorous strokes, creating a sense of \u201cangry\u201d brushwork; collages are more disjointed than previous ones. This is where some commentary on the sitters and her relationships with them would come to the (curatorial) rescue and provide some depth: Who are these people, and why does she paint them if not to satisfy an ever-demanding clientele of private collectors?<\/p>\n

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\t\tJenny Saville, \u201cMessenger\u201d (2020\u201321), acrylic and oil on canvas<\/p>\n

In 2020, Saville discussed her myriad painterly techniques and influences on a fascinating episode of the A Brush With<\/a> podcast. She detailed her extensive reading of poetry, Goethe, and myths, as well as the impact of visiting artists\u2019 studios. De Kooning apparently inspired her current set up of two giant glass palettes side by side to work from simultaneously in her studio. National Portrait Gallery curator Sarah Howgate, working closely with the artist, communicates little of this; in fact, Saville\u2019s gallery, Gagosian \u2014 the largest name in the official list of the show\u2019s major supporters \u2014 looms ominously, while Howgate isn\u2019t mentioned anywhere in the wall texts, as the captioning throughout follows the \u201chere\u2019s the title, here\u2019s the year, here\u2019s the owner; good luck to you\u201d school of commercial gallery curating. <\/p>\n

It is unthinkable that no mention is made of the cultural import in the UK of her collaboration with Welsh rock band the Manic Street Preachers for their 1994 album The Holy Bible<\/a>, and the dichotomy of Saville\u2019s fleshy nudes and the band\u2019s lyrics addressing body dysmorphia and eating disorders. Readers of my reviews will well know my frustration with overenthusiastic captioning and over-contextualizing, but this is the total opposite. Throw the audience a bone, please.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, the museum\u2019s decision to list major benefactors and foundations, but not the curator, on the main web page and in the show may indicate the powers at play, and perhaps why Saville has never had a survey show outside a commercial gallery until now. Museums are at the mercy of ever-decreasing government funding, and we are seeing an increase in collaborations with commercial movers and shakers \u2014 who own most of Saville\u2019s work anyway \u2014 to get something like this mounted. This exhibition is an absolute must-see, for the incendiary art and because it\u2019s a microcosm of the commercial art process: Young artists\u2019 work is acquired by by Saatchi; it remains a consistent hot-ticket purchase among private players; the artist receives a historicizing retrospective in a major institution with token curatorial gloss. Et voila.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\t\tJenny Saville, \u201cHyphen\u201d (1999), oil on canvas; Private Collection (courtesy Gagosian \u00a9 Jenny Saville)
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\t\tInstallation view of Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting at the National Portrait Gallery, London
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\t\tJenny Saville, \u201cThe Mothers\u201d (2011), oil and charcoal on canvas
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\t\tJenny Saville, \u201cRuben\u2019s Flap\u201d (1998\u201399), oil on canvas<\/p>\n

Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting<\/a> continues at the National Portrait Gallery (St Martin\u2019s Place, London, England) through September 7. The exhibition was curated by Sarah Howgate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LONDON \u2014 Of all the YBAs (Young British Artists) of the 1990s \u2014 including upstarts like Damien Hirst…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":379543,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3939],"tags":[4021,4020,4022,77,257,132215,16,132216,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-379542","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-design","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-london","13":"tag-portraiture","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-uk-national-portrait-gallery","16":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115104771324063917","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=379542"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379542\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/379543"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=379542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=379542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=379542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}