Jenny Saville, Painter

Jenny Saville

Back in 2010, I wrote on painting the human body. One of the artists whose works I included in the post was Jenny Saville. Today I want to present her and her work, as I believe she is one of the most promising artists of today.

Jenny Saville: Shift

Jenny Saville was born in Cambridge in 1970. She graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1992. Her entire degree show was bought by Charles Saatchi and she later created a new body of work to be displayed in his London gallery.

Like the late Lucian Freud she paints women who are not exactly “thin”. But all likeness to Freud ends here. Saville is a subversive in my view. Her “fat” women undermine the stability of the “normal” society. But one may wonder: is the reason ideological, or is it simply that Saville paints flesh so well that she needs big bodies so that she can paint more and more?

Jenny Saville: Plan

I proceed with Under the skin, an interview of the artist to “The Guardian”. It is an interview that gives an answer to the previous question.

“Jenny Saville’s paintings are known for the mountains of flesh they reveal, but it is the neuroses bursting through that interest her, she tells Suzie Mackenzie.”

Jenny Saville: Red Stare Head IV

Saville is currently exhibiting in the Gagosian Gallery in New York . The title of her exibition is “Continuum”. When Saville exhibited in Gagosian Gallery in New York back in 1999, Roberta Smith of the “New York Times wrote:

Jenny Saville: Isis

“Ms. Saville is 29, and a discovery of the English collector Charles Saatchi. Four of her earlier works are in ”Sensation,” the widely reported exhibition of Mr. Saatchi’s collection of English art now at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Ms. Saville’s general strategy is to exaggerate the age-old artistic obsession with the female nude — reflected in Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt and Ingres, for example — to extremes of imposing wall-like massiveness, where the body’s and the painting’s surface become one.”

Back in the Spring of 2010 Saville exhibited in the Gagosian Gallery of London three drawings.

“Bodies fascinate me. I find having the framework of a body essential. Having flesh as a central subject, I can channel a lot of ideas. “
Jenny Saville

Jenny Saville: Nativity I

“Each of the three drawings in this exhibition portrays the intimate relationship between mother and child, inspired in particular by Leonardo da Vinci’s cartoon The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and John the Baptist(National Gallery, London) an atypical scene in which the Virgin contends with a lively Christ-child.  ” (Source: Free Art London List)

Jenny Saville: Nativity II

I conclude this dedication to Jenny Saville with two video clips made in the New York Academy of Art, during the delivery of the 2011 Commencement Address.

(1/2)

2011 Commencement Address (2/2)

Painting the Human Body and Flesh

Back in 1995 I visited an exhibition of the late period Degas in the National Gallery of London. Among the works, were many with naked distorted female bodies bathing, drying themselves, combing their hair. At first it looked like the result of compulsive voyeurism of the aging artist. After having a second look, my view changed. these were not simple paintings. They were odes to the female body, poems without verses, songs without sound. The Degas pictures were wonderful sonatas, chamber music to introduce me to the complex world of painting the flesh.

The gigantic canvases where Cezanne depicted his bathers, came next in my journey of discovery of paintings depicting the body and the flesh. After the Degas chamber music, the time came for the symphony. Degas dresses his pictures with warmth and caress. The Cezanne bathers are bronze-like, and almost clumsy. These figures are not feminine in the sense that Degas’s are. In a sense they are naked Amazones, ready to fight. Some have called Cezanne’s bathers a reflection of his misoginy.

Any reference to Cezanne’s Bathers would be incomplete without the “Three Bathers”, which is the ultimate statement made by Cezanne regarding the female body and the flesh. A statement that expresses his complete lack of appreciation of the female body, in the sense that one cannot see even a fragment of passion in the endless surfaces of female flesh he put on the canvas.

The three figures are seen in a night scene, bathed in the moonlight, neglecting any bystander, focusing on their leisure and relaxation. Again there is no sign of femininity, nor of sexual appeal. The solid figures have nothing to do with the academic ideal, they are closer to ordinary working women, seen from a distance, as animals grazing the zoo’s grass.

Matisse loved women. His “Three bathers and a turtle” display his passion and love for the female body. It is like a hymn to the woman, prior to his painting the “Joy of life”.

The joy of life of radiant Mediterranean colours gives its place to the introspection of Central Europe and the tension of Expressionism.

The contours of the body are shores containing the waves of passion and desire.

The European North in the face of Munch makes the body a continent of rivers, lakes, mountains.

Lucian Freud, the grand child of Sigmund, brings the earth on the body, makes it a fertile field.

Francis Bacon makes the body a field of horrors. Deformation, dicease, decasy, and ultimately Death inhabit the canvas.

Jenny Saville paints herself and her sister as twins, and the canvas erupts with color gradations.

Saville’s self portrait is a scream. Her flesh melts like ice cream, it floats on dirty air.

David Hockney’s Teressa is a collage that invites us to rethink the space and the body.

It is time for the spirit and the bodies of the women already depicted to exit the scene. No other than Marel Duchamp is directing their grand exit down the stairs.