Jenny Saville: The Art of the Nude

Born in Cambridge in 1970, Saville studied at the Glasgow School of Art. She spent a semester abroad at the University of Cincinnati, and confessed that it was there, in the land of junk food, that she discovered her artistic passion for the large women that are the subjects of most of her paintings. The art dealer Charles Saatchi discovered her in 1993, and bought all of her graduation works. This launched her career and she joined the ranks of the YBAs (Young British Artists), creating eccentric paintings, mainly nudes, which defied the canonized version of female beauty.

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Saville soon exhibited in galleries around London, and her fame grew during the 1990s. She became one of the emblematic figures of the YBAs movement, along with artists such as Damien Hirst and Rachel Whiteread. Her works are often panoramic on very large formats, and reveal a range of influences. Picasso and Rembrandt are classical inspirations, and the American photographer Cindy Sherman is a more modern example. Medical imagery and plastic surgery also figure into her work, recalling her time spent attending sessions with the New York doctor Barry Martin Weintraub. Saville appropriates references from all over to better concoct her own universe, created through thickly textured oil paint and large brushstrokes. Her portraits transgress prohibitions by giving a central place to the flesh, to obese, dying, or transsexual bodies – in short, to those who are often ignored or denied a place in the artistic canon.

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Often distorted and bloated, even tortured, Saville’s nudes saturate the space of the canvas and reveal themselves to be incredibly precise. They force the viewer to question their beliefs about who or what makes an appropriate subject for a painting, and reflect on the torments present in society. Her paintings go against all the conventional notions of beauty as it is represented in art; those of idealized silhouettes, of harmonious curves, of smooth skin. Some argue that her works contain a political criticism of men’s view of women’s bodies, a tyrannical view that Saville makes fun of by marking some of her nudes with a black felt pen, like a surgeon drawing on the body that he intends to liposuction or otherwise remold. 

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Another particularity of Saville’s paintings, along with their monumentality, is their autobiographical scope. Works such as Branded (1992) feature the artist’s face juxtaposed onto an obese female body. In 2002, she collaborated with the British photographer Glen Luchford to create oversized pictures of herself lying on a sheet of glass, taken from below to capture sections of her flesh pressed against the surface. There is a definite vulnerability in her work, and she has never hesitated to expose her intimacy. 

Now in her fifties and a member of the Royal Academy, Jenny Saville continues to exhibit her work in the most famous galleries in the world. Halfway between abstraction and figuration, it is not uncommon for her creations to share the picture rails with works by 20th-century classical painters. Previous shows have paired her with the likes of Egon Schiele, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon; her ambiguity in depicting flesh and her close-up framing parallel Bacon’s style especially. Saville’s larger works regularly sell at auction for several million pounds, and it was the $12 million sale of her self-portrait Propped in October 2018 that catapulted her to the position of most expensive living female artist in the world. 

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