Jenny Saville’s art is shaking up the National Portrait Gallery, showcasing her monumental nudes and provocative style. Is she truly Britain’s greatest living painter, or does the exhibition reveal more about the commercial forces shaping contemporary art? Find out why this show is causing such a stir!
Jenny Saville stands as a monumental figure among the Young British Artists of the 1990s, transcending the provocative gestures of her contemporaries to etch a profound legacy in art history. With superb draughtsmanship honed by a deep understanding of Old Masters, Saville’s painterly technique expertly manipulates the plasticity of oil, positioning her as a leading contender for Britain’s greatest living painter since the passing of Lucien Freud, a claim many argue even surpasses David Hockney.
The early impact of Saville’s groundbreaking **contemporary paintings** on the British art scene is hard to overstate, though many of her significant works reside in discerning private collections. The current survey at the **National Portrait Gallery** offers a rare public glimpse into her expansive vision. Viewers encountering her art for the first time are often struck by the enormous scale of her uncomfortably close-cropped depictions of women’s faces and nude bodies, which revel in the joy of painterly modeling, from bare canvas patches to swift, thick, viscous slathers and dappled dry brush blends. This sheer size alone can be a revelation for those accustomed to digital reproductions, revealing a wealth of virtuosic brushwork.
Despite the exhibition’s venue, the absence of conventional “portraits” within the **Jenny Saville art** display at the National Portrait Gallery presents a curatorial paradox. Saville’s interest is primarily academic, delving into the topography of the human form rather than conventional portraiture or explicit commentary on body image issues. Key works like “Plan” (1993) contour nude flesh like an ordinance map, while “Ruben’s Flap” (1998–99) updates Old Master fleshy folds to contemporary unidealized body types. Her vibrant use of flat red in “Figure 11.23” (1997) reflects Renaissance color discipline, emphasizing depth over realistic depiction.
Saville’s profound engagement with art history extends to a fantastic sequence of mother and child images, referencing Michelangelo’s Pietas and Maestas with bulbous, entasis-style children echoing his Madonna of Bruges, reimagined in colored pencil. However, her attempts in the mid to late 2010s to infuse her compositions with de Kooning-like abstraction, breaking down nudes into intertwining layers and squiggles, sometimes feel forced. These efforts, alongside nods to Cy Twombly, occasionally obscure her remarkable gift for three-dimensional modeling, seemingly sacrificing the emotional depth of her earlier work for academic experimentation.
Strangely, it is often her more conventional, enormous-scale framed faces that appear anaemic, with some works exhibiting varying degrees of effort. More recent pieces, while louder in tone, often convey a quieter effect, particularly in the final room, dubbed the “rainbow filter” for its projected spectrums onto visages, reminiscent of social media filters. This stylistic shift raises questions about whether the oversaturated digital world influences her painterly tropes, leading to unnaturally zingy colors, “angry” oil stick brushwork, and disjointed collages, perhaps signaling a demand for more explicit commentary on her sitters.
In a revealing 2020 podcast, **Jenny Saville** discussed her manifold techniques and influences, including extensive reading of poetry, Goethe, and myths, alongside insights gained from visiting other artists’ studios. She revealed how de Kooning inspired her current studio setup of two giant glass palettes for simultaneous work. Yet, the **National Portrait Gallery** exhibition, curated by Sarah Howgate, communicates little of this rich background, leaving the viewer to infer much. Instead, the prominent listing of Gagosian, Saville’s gallery and a major show supporter, overshadows curatorial contributions, with wall texts adhering to a commercial gallery’s minimalist approach.
A significant missed opportunity lies in the exhibition’s failure to acknowledge the substantial cultural import of Saville’s collaboration with the Welsh rock band Manic Street Preachers for their 1994 album, which powerfully juxtaposed her fleshy nudes with lyrics addressing body dysmorphia. While some art contexts suffer from over-explanation, this show represents the opposite extreme, leaving audiences wanting more contextual “bones.” This curatorial silence, coupled with the museum’s prominent display of benefactors over the curator, highlights the growing influence of commercial entities—who own most of Saville’s work—in mounting major institutional shows, reflecting the challenges faced by museums with diminishing government funding.
Despite these curatorial critiques and the overarching commercial undercurrents, this art exhibition remains an absolute must-see for anyone interested in contemporary British art. It not only presents incendiary art but also serves as a microcosm of the commercial art process: where young artists’ work is acquired by influential figures like Saatchi, becomes a hot-ticket among private collectors, and eventually garners a historicizing retrospective in a major institution, often with a token curatorial gloss. This journey is as compelling as Saville’s canvases themselves.
