Among all the Young British Artists (YBAs) who emerged in the 1990s, including provocateurs like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin who challenged the art establishment with dead livestock and unmade beds, Jenny Saville stands out as the most deeply rooted in art history. Following the death of Lucien Freud, Saville can most convincingly claim the title of Britain's greatest living painter, surpassing even David Hockney in technical mastery and artistic significance.
Saville's exceptional draftsmanship skills, informed by her deep understanding of the Old Masters, combine with a painterly technique that exploits the full plasticity of her medium. Her style is as complete and significant as that of Freud himself. This stands in stark contrast to contemporaries like Tracey Emin, who holds a professorship of drawing at the Royal Academy despite lacking fundamental drawing skills.
The impact of Saville's early works on British contemporary painting cannot be overstated. However, her paintings typically disappear into discerning private collections, making those in public collections rare treasures. Her current survey exhibition, "The Anatomy of Painting" at the National Portrait Gallery, offers a unique opportunity to experience this impact firsthand for many viewers encountering her work for the first time.
Saville's works are enormous in scale, featuring uncomfortably close-cropped depictions of women's faces and nude bodies that celebrate the joy of painterly modeling. Her technique ranges from bare patches of canvas to swift, thick, viscous applications of paint, to delicately dappled dry brush blends. The large scale alone may shock viewers accustomed to seeing only digital reproductions on screens. Her sophisticated distribution of muted and contrasting tones provides a wealth of virtuosic brushwork to absorb.
Despite the painterly excellence, the National Portrait Gallery's exhibition presents a curious paradox: a portrait gallery show containing not a single traditional portrait. Visitors learn the identities of only a few sitters, and neither the museum nor Saville explains particular reasons for portraying them or details about painter-sitter relationships. Her approach appears primarily academic, with only superficial gestures toward body image issues and notably absent pieces explicitly addressing gender identity.
Key works in the exhibition demonstrate Saville's mastery of art historical references. In "Plan" (1993), she contours nude flesh like an ordnance survey map's terrain. "Rubens Flap" (1998-99) references the fleshy folds favored by the Dutch master, updated to reflect the real folds of contemporary, unidealized body types. In her most color-saturated flesh rendering, "Figure 11.23" (1997), she deploys flat red in the Renaissance discipline of cangiante, using depth of color rather than muted tones for shade instead of realistically depicting blood.
A fantastic sequence of mother and child images references both Pietàs and Maestàs from Michelangelo, with bulbous children bending toward viewers in an entasis-style that distinctly echoes his Madonna of Bruges or Raphael's soft sfumato, reimagined in colored pencil. However, Saville fails to successfully integrate her influences when channeling her admiration for Willem 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. "Out of one, two (symposium)" (2016) nods to Cy Twombly simply by overlaying nude figures with scribbles. These academic attempts at abstraction, the opposite of Renaissance Old Master figure modeling, seem to come at the expense of her work's soul.
The conventional portraits in the exhibition—simply framed faces rendered on enormous scales—appear strangely anemic, with noticeable duplications of the same portrait showing varying degrees of effort. More recent works are louder in tone yet quieter in effect. The final exhibition room could be renamed "rainbow filter," as the palette splits into the entire spectrum with rainbows projected onto visages, resembling social media filters.
Despite the power of her early work, the oversaturated digital world may demand that Saville amplify her painterly techniques to maintain relevance. Colors become unnaturally vibrant, oil sticks are deployed in vigorous strokes creating angry brushwork, and collages appear more disjointed than previous iterations. Commentary on the sitters and her relationships with them would provide crucial depth and context that the exhibition sorely lacks.
In 2020, Saville discussed her diverse painterly techniques and influences on "A Brush With" podcast, detailing her extensive reading of poetry, Goethe, and myths, plus the impact of visiting other artists' studios. De Kooning apparently inspired her current studio setup featuring two giant glass palettes positioned side by side for simultaneous work. Unfortunately, National Portrait Gallery curator Sarah Howgate, working closely with the artist, communicates little of this rich background.
The exhibition's commercial influences are evident, with Saville's gallery, Gagosian—listed as a major supporter—looming prominently while Howgate receives no mention in wall texts. The captioning follows a minimal "here's the title, here's the year, here's the owner" approach typical of commercial gallery presentations. Remarkably, no mention appears of Saville's culturally significant collaboration with Welsh rock band Manic Street Preachers for their 1994 album "The Holy Bible," which created a compelling dichotomy between her fleshy nudes and the band's lyrics addressing body dysmorphia and eating disorders.
The museum's decision to prominently list major benefactors and foundations while omitting the curator from main web pages and exhibition materials may indicate the commercial powers at play. This could explain why Saville has never received a survey show outside commercial galleries until now. Museums facing ever-decreasing government funding increasingly collaborate with commercial players who own most of Saville's work anyway to mount such exhibitions.
This exhibition serves as both an absolute must-see for its incendiary art and as a microcosm of the contemporary commercial art process: young artists' work gets acquired by collectors like Saatchi, remains consistently popular among private buyers, and the artist eventually receives a historicizing retrospective at a major institution with minimal curatorial context. The "Anatomy of Painting" exhibition continues at the National Portrait Gallery through September 7, curated by Sarah Howgate.
