‘Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting’

National Portrait Gallery, London, 20 June–7 September 2025

 

Lorraine Bacchus

 

‘Try and stay ignored for as long as possible.’^[1] At the time Cy Twombly (1928–2011) gave this advice to Jenny Saville, she had already attracted the kind of attention that is the stuff of dreams for most artists. She was sponsored straight out of art school by Charles Saatchi in 1992 and her career has continued its stellar path. So what did Twombly mean? ‘He was a hero of mine’, says Saville, ‘so of course I thought, “This guy doesn’t like my work very much”. However, I know now that he was saying a young painter [she was 29, he was 71] needs time to learn, to develop. He was talking about how you should keep a constant creative searching.’^[2]

She has kept faith with his counsel, fearlessly pushing herself as a painter and, to some extent, staying ignored. Until now Saville has been more fêted in the US and Italy than in Britain. Part of the reason her work is rarely seen is that most of her output is quickly snaffled by wealthy private collectors. But here many of them are, on a grand public outing – 50 drawings and paintings from throughout her career to date.

Seeing them en masse makes this exhibition the proverbial game-changer. Impossible for her to be ignored after this, a show of staggering versatility and technical skill by an artist dedicated to her craft and justifiably described as one of the world’s foremost contemporary painters.

Saville, now 55, was one of the Young British Artists and the sole figurative painter in the legendary exhibition ‘Sensation’ at the Royal Academy in 1997. She has always been a figurative artist, devoted to the genre even through all the years when conceptual art reigned. An experiment with pure abstraction felt like she was ‘giving up the game’^[3] of the centuries old tradition of representing the human body. This is not to denigrate abstract art, for which she has a passion. She clearly delights in fusing the languages of figuration and abstraction so that her paintings always have a sense of disruption.

Having been coached from a young age by her uncle, the artist Paul Saville, to appreciate the realism of the Old Masters, she now has what she calls a team with whom she is in constant dialogue. Velázquez, Titian and Rembrandt are first, followed by a long list including Michelangelo, Leonardo, late Degas pastels, Soutine… ‘I feel like I’m in a sort of pinball with those artists as I go between them looking for what I need.’^[4]

 

 

The illustrations are of works by Jenny Saville

1 Compass, 2013. Private collection © Jenny Saville, Courtesy Gagosian

 

In 2021 Saville was invited to respond to Michelangelo’s marble Deposition as part of a showing of her work across five museums in Florence. The result was Pietà I (Pl 1) and is part of this London exhibition. A monumental drawing in charcoal and pastel, it shows a grouping of intertwined human forms in extremis but with gestures of exquisitely drawn tenderness towards each other.

In Aleppo (Pl 2), also in charcoal and pastel, Saville evokes the tradition of the Pietà in a heart-breaking reference to the plethora of images from today’s news of children being carried bleeding and dying from war zones.

 

 

2 Aleppo, 2017–2018. Collection of the artist © Jenny Saville, courtesy NGS

 

The pairing of her work with the Italian Renaissance was an example of Saville’s insistence that it is possible to refer to tradition without being traditional. During her own experience of early motherhood, Saville turned to Renaissance drawings of the Madonna and Child, as well as Rembrandt’s pen-and-ink depictions of mothers and children. There is an entire room dedicated here to her emotive, multi-layered portrayals of the genre, in which she herself is struggling to hold onto her wriggling baby. Dominating the display is The Mothers (Pl 3), a large-scale portrait in oil, overlaid, pentimento, on multiple charcoal sketches of her son’s efforts to escape his mother’s arms.

 

 

3 The Mothers by Jenny Saville, 2011, Oil and Charcoal on Canvas, 2700 x 2200 mm. Collection of Lisa and Steven Tananbaum, ©Jenny Saville.

 

Nearby are numerous smaller charcoal and pastel drawings, also self-portraits made when heavily pregnant and while grappling with her first child. They give a tremendous sense of her intense concentration, her fascination with motherhood and snatched moments in time, something familiar to all young mothers.

The energy of these works is in contrast to the pictorial silence of the next room, containing only one painting and three delicate drawings. The painting is ‘Rosetta II’ (Pl 4), a portrait of a blind woman made while Saville was based in Naples. She describes it as ‘a mystic in ecstatic concentration … the first beautiful picture I made’.^[5] It has a palpable sense of the trust that was built up between the sitter and the artist.

 

 

4 Rosetta II, 2005–2006. Private collection. © Jenny Saville, Courtesy Gagosian

 

 

5 Propped, 1992. Private Collection. © Jenny Saville, Courtesy Gagosian

 

Propped (Pl 5), the colossal, nude self-portrait that prompted Saatchi’s sponsoring of Saville, is facing visitors as they enter. Hung at the far end of a narrow room its scale and drama is impressive even at a distance. The price tag is similarly large, having sold at auction in 2018 for £9.5m, a record for a living female artist. Some viewers were grimacing, sensing the pain of her naked backside perched on such a tiny stool. Her knees are thrust forward so they are huge in the foreground; her feet incongruously encased in a pair of dainty, silk sling-back shoes. Such contradiction is a hallmark of Saville’s work.

While ‘Propped’ is a pivotal early painting, it does not define her style now. Her anatomically superb realism still prevails but the forms now emerge, often fragmented, from wildly expressive areas of abstraction with the flesh saturated in unnatural colour. In Chasah (Pl 6), for example, the top of the head is a dynamic melee of brushstrokes, drips and abstract marks, which disrupt the usual expectation of positive and negative space.

 

 

6 Chasah, 2020. Private Collection © Jenny Saville, Courtesy Gagosian

 

It is the scale of the paintings that is, quite frankly, awe-inspiring, like finding oneself amongst the Brobdingnagians. Even Saville marvels at the vigour and strength of her youth. When she was working on Fulcrum (1998–9, oil on canvas, 261.6 x 487.7 cm, The Broad Art Foundation), which features three women lying horizontally on top of each other, she called it ‘the bitch’ because it was so difficult to manoeuvre in her studio. One imagines the models also had a few choice words to describe the experience of posing for it. No wonder Saville mostly works from photos she has taken of her sitters.

Some of the paintings, such as Stare (Pl 7), are shocking but at the same time ‘so completely compelling of our attention that we do not look away’.^[6] At least ‘Stare’ is shown here without a content warning. In 2009 when the Manic Street Preachers used it on the cover of their album, Journal for Plague Lovers, it was considered so shocking that supermarkets would only display the record in a plain sleeve cover.

 

 

7 Stare, 2004–2005. The Board Art

 

Saville is continuing a trail of violence that runs throughout art history – previously, mostly to be found in Biblical scenes. Saville’s inspiration, meanwhile, comes from contemporary life and nature: ‘There’s nothing more violent than a sunset at its peak. I’ve spent time in pathology rooms and anatomy rooms, I’ve seen heads that have been blown apart by shotgun fire, but nothing is as violent as a full (Greek) sunset.’^[7]

Saville’s female bodies are frequently described as Rubenesque. But the title of her painting, Ruben’s Flap (Pl 8), alludes not to the artist but her experience of watching a cosmetic surgeon – when she witnessed the unmediated layers of human flesh that have since informed so much of her work.

 

 

8 Ruben’s Flap, 1998–1999. The George Economou Collection © Jenny Saville, Courtesy Gagosian

 

The term refers to a surgical technique that takes flesh from a woman’s thigh to use in breast reconstruction. The painting is a collage of body parts, straight edges reflecting surgeons’ ability to cut flaps of flesh and move it around the body to rebuild it.

On the back cover of the sumptuous catalogue that accompanies this exhibition is a photograph taken by Nigel Parry in 1995 of the young Saville – sensual, smeared in paint, eyeballing the world, a tableau vivant – which, even in black and white, is like a foretelling of the staring head paintings she would go on to make. It embodies what this show is all about – the physicality of paint and the ‘magical process’^[8] of painting.

The National Portrait Gallery is perhaps a surprising venue for this retrospective of Saville’s work, in the sense that her paintings are not usually of a named person – which is the tradition for work shown in the Gallery. But who cares? They’ve given us a gem of a show, a stunning tribute to an artist who has worked ceaselessly in her quest to achieve, as she says, ‘something significant’. See it while you can.

 

‘Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting’ was created in close collaboration with the artist and includes works borrowed from important public and private collections around the world. Accompanying the exhibition is a stunning catalogue with multiple texts, including a conversation between Saville and Sarah Howgate, Senior Curator, Contemporary Collections, National Portrait Gallery.

‘Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting’ is also shown 12 October 2025–18 January 2026, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas

 

1. Marion Barthelme Lecture: Jenny Saville on Cy Twombly, 2024. ↑
2. Ibid. ↑
3. Podcast, ‘A Brush With … Jenny Saville’, The Art Newspaper, 2020. ↑
4. Ibid. ↑
5. Gagosian. ↑
6. John Elderfield, The Anatomy of Painting. ↑
7. Marion Barthelme Lecture: Jenny Saville on Cy Twombly, 2024. ↑
8. Podcast, ‘A Brush With … Jenny Saville’, The Art Newspaper, 2020. ↑