‘So much emotion in a single image': I join a schoolclass admiring Jenny Saville's astonishing new portraits

The Guardian

4 days ago

I went to see Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting at the National Portrait Gallery recently and the exhibition was swarming with teenagers. Equipped with notepads and sketchbooks, scribbling down words like 'expressive', 'daring' and 'beautiful', the budding art enthusiasts seemed enraptured by Saville's portraits: from blemished backs and wounded faces to colossal closeups of girls and fleshy nude women. I got talking to an art teacher and her sixth formers and we discussed how Saville's bodies are the antithesis to the idealised forms we see online today; and how stunned we were by the landscape of textures that can exist within a single cheek.
Seventeen-year-old Laurence – who makes drawings with a ballpoint pen – admired the 'messy side' to Saville's work and was fascinated by 'just how much emotion she could portray in one image'. His classmate Georgia, also 17, was drawn to her 'vibrant colours' and felt 'positively overwhelmed' by the paintings, in particular Propped, an exposing early self-portrait that was part of the artist's Glasgow School of Art degree show. Fusing beauty and brutality, a softness and sharpness, a nude Saville sits on a precarious-looking stool (spikily jamming into her ankle), with bitten-down nails that violently claw into her skin.
Look closer and you'll see the painting is overlaid with text (written backwards) that reads: 'if we continue to speak in this sameness – speak as men have spoken for centuries, we will fail each other'. It's a translation from the French feminist Luce Irigaray's 1980 essay When Our Lips Speak Together, and draws not only on the importance of art history not repeating itself (by excluding voices and subjects), but – more powerfully today – about the failings of current leaders.
'It's really inspiring for young women in art to be controversial,' Georgia said. 'It also makes you more confident in your ability and appearance, because you see Saville create it in a beautiful painting.' Frustrated at how 'inaccessible' being an artist has been for women in history, and questioning why men get to be covered up with a fig leaf, whereas women are often fully exposed, she said: 'When [a self-portrait like this] is done by a woman, it's empowering in itself – it's women taking back control.'
Georgia's words took me back to my own experiences as a teenager with Saville, who I studied as part of my GCSEs in the early 2010s. I remember my classmates and I coming into school with printouts of our faces pressed up against glass windows (no doubt reluctantly taken by our mums) that distorted our features like Saville's 2002 Closed Contact self-portraits, made with photographer Glen Luchford. Full of expression, and evocative of our teenage angst, the works got us thinking about how portraiture, like our lives, could be messy, fractured, emotional, internal – seemingly worlds away from the gilt-framed pictures that we often saw in museums, or the airbrushed photoshoots in magazines.
But only now, at this show, have I been able to understand the monumental impact of her paintings. Not only in challenging notions of beauty in a patriarchal world, but in her ambition to push paint – and charcoal, in her mesmerising drawings – to new limits, in order to viscerally confront, stun and challenge.
Whether it be a bloodied face examined under a bright white light, bodies fading from life right in front of us, or her truthful insights on motherhood, Saville's works hold the attention in ways that affirm the power of painting in a world overtaken by mindless scrolling. It was this that I also discussed with the teenagers, whose astute observations made me feel so encouraged about what art can offer us, in this tumultuous world.
But these precious youthful discussions could become a rarity, thanks to ever decreasing government funding in arts education. As outlined in the recent spending review, the total expenditure of Department for Culture, Media and Sport will be reduced by 1.4% over the next three years, and research shows that only 38% of A-level students are taking at least one humanities subject (a statistic that drops to 24% when it comes to arts subjects). As a result, we are experiencing a crisis when it comes to lack of opportunities for creatives from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.
Incredibly, Saville's exhibition is free for anyone aged 25 and under, thanks to a private donor. I hope this will encourage young people of all backgrounds to enter these spaces and feel welcome to discuss, debate and come back again – and to understand the raw, visceral power that painting and the arts can have.