An analysis of the feminist nude through the work of Jenny Saville

Subtracted from the thesis “Three aspects of the feminist nude” (originally titled as: Τρείς εκδοχές του φεμινιστικού γυμνού), Chapter 7C: An analysis of the feminist nude through the work of Jenny Saville, p. 104–125

“What is beauty? Beauty is usually the male image of the female body. My women are beautiful in their individuality.”

Jenny Saville

Jenny Saville is a world renowned contemporary artist, who became well known through her paintings that show the human body –usually female- without and desire to resemble to the traditional aspects of beauty and feminity. In fact, most of her nudes represent overweight or bruised women. She describes herself as a feminist.

Saville was born in Cambridge in the 1970s and was one of the four children in her family. She knew from an early age that she wanted to be an artist. Her parents encouraged her creativity and allowed her to have her own private space to paint, a studio was made available to her. Her uncle, who was a professor of art history, helped her develop her technical skills and taught her how to observe the world around her. She studied in Glasgow School of Art, an institution that introduced her to the principles of working as an artist. This was a good start to become preoccupied with painting from nature, because students often worked with nude models.2 Her academic studies offered her a form of freedom, teaching her the basic principles, she later got the opportunity to deconstruct. In Glasgow she earned many awards, as well as a scholarship from Cincinnati University. It is there she met obese women for the first time. They were the source of inspiration for her graduation exhibition in 1992 and led to her obsession with human flesh.

Towards the end of her studies, art collector Saatchi bought all of her works from the graduation exhibition. He offered her an eighteen-month contract that supported her financially while she created new paintings she later exhibited in Saatchi Gallery, London. Saville became soon renowned to the public for re-creating art through the classic notions of painting, especially for her female nudes on a large scale. At the time she also won the award of Young British Artist (YBA). The subjects of her art are obese and often faceless women with huge bodies inspired from her travels in America. They captured her interest for their contrast to the contemporary beauty ideals. Her work usually includes huge pieces of distorted flesh, with brushwork on surfaces of oil paint. After her debut in 1992, her work continues to concentrate on the female body, but she often deals with people who are in between genders or transsexuals. Her published sketches and records include photos of liposuction surgeries, trauma patients, plastic surgeries to correct disfigurement, as well as transsexual patients and their surgeries.3

Today Jenny Saville is one of the most talented and upcoming artists of the 21st century, who works and lives in London, where she teaches painting at Slade School of Art , successfully sharing and learning through her students. Since new technologies have been introduced to the art word and artists have discovered innovative multimedia ways to portray art, Saville has joined in rediscovering the notions of classic body painting while redefining a place for it in contemporary art history .4

Branded (1992)

Here Jenny Saville is painting her own face in the body of an overweight woman. In “Branded” we can see a contradiction between human mental constructions and physical forms. The position of the woman in the painting is distorted, much too short in a way that the size of her hips and abdominal area is unrealistic, while her breasts and torso look huge. At the same time, the position is more natural and relaxed from the position a professional model would take. Different words in red color are etched on the body. The words branded, supportive, decorative unearth the social positions that are often placed upon women, unnatural but at the same time so concrete that physically brand women forever. The subject is squashing excessive abdomen flab as if to observe it, confronting it as piece of meat or fat that shouldn’t be there. She turns her head away from her and the words that are branded on it.

Her work has often been compared to the work of Jo Spence “Branded”, since it adopts the same rhetorical practice with words marking a detestable female body. Alison Rowley reports that many where offended by Saville’s work and found her effort to refer to Spence’s work overbold, since Jo Spence herself wrote on her own sick elderly body the word “Monster” in an attempt to defend herself and condemn her audience. It is a fact that both works of art have marked the history of feministic art practices. Both are based on self-examination as a starting point, to relate with matters such as the bodily and physical attributes of women. 5

Plan (1993)

In “Plan” we can see a woman covered in red liposuction markings. The woman is looking down, as if reading her weight on a scale but at the same time her gaze meets the eyes of the audience. Her breasts are heavy and large and she has to lift them with her hands in order to observe her entire body. The viewpoint offers an exaggerated effect, especially regarding the size of her thighs. The painting transfuses the sensation of observing someone who is condemned to always comparing her body to beauty ideals which are t constantly projected by the media. Perhaps this woman is considering herself to be fatter than she really is.6 Like most of the paintings of Jenny Saville , this work is to some extent a self-portrait , since she uses her own face on a body that is partly foreign, but at the same time her own. The liposuction lines resemble the contour lines on a landscape map, offering a natural effect: just as these maps are constructions of the human mind in an attempt to regulate the natural landscape. The female body is compared to free nature, while the liposuction lines symbolize an attempt to change its primal physical state. The lines indicate incision points during the surgery procedure and simultaneously map the physical female body depending on the areas of fat concentration. Those lines resemble the surgical sections, but also create the impression of dissecting the painting. 7

Trace (1993–1994)

In her work “Trace” we see the marks of the day on the female body. The traces that remain from the panties, the bra and the clothes are visible. There is a brutality in those traces, representing the struggles tight elastic underwear creates on the human skin. The image implies that this woman is trying to fit into clothes that are way too small for her , although the line in her back is pointing out that her bra was a bad fit , at least a size bigger than what she needs. Those marks are the same every woman finds when she removes her clothes at the end of the day. The feeling of pain dominates in the painting. From the position of the shoulders, there is an inkling that this woman is not pleased with her body and the color pallet portrays a bruised appearance, not that physical but metaphorical.8Just as with the painting “Plan” this is a woman who doesn’t perceive her body the way it really is.

The Mothers (2011)

In this painting we see Saville herself right after the birth of her children, holding two infants in her hands and her post-pregnancy belly. The sketches around the painting show the different realities that co-exist within the painting. She herself states in the interview with the Guardian , that while she was painting her children were growing up and the painting was growing and transforming with them. The contrast one sketch creates on another, represents the rift between the reality and the realm of the painting, the movement between memory and image. Her later works are inspired from the experience of maternity. She feels the need to work, but at the same time is inspired by the way her children paint, embracing this inspiration into her work. She is especially inspired from the process of birth using photos from the procedure and her own experience. 9

The importance of female nude in her work

All of Jenny Saville’s works are concentrated on one point, the flesh and the nude body released from the clothes that dress and protect. In the meanwhile her work quite often resembles a walk to the butcher shop rather than images from an average Playboy magazine. Her work could not have been more remote from the ideal female bodies represented by the male world, but at the same time she introduces us to an undefinable space beweeen pride and grotesque. Her work is marriage between the brutal misogynism of Willem de Kooning to the constant hunger of Lucian Freud with a feminist touch.10

Lucian Freud’s paintings concentrate on the natural and physical attributes of the psychological state of the portrayed figure. The nude in his work “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping” depicts with interesting lines the naked flesh .The position of the figure in the studio adds to the essence of natural weight and size of the figure, while remaining a traditional painting with a male gaze reinforced on the female nude. Saville’s paintings are based to a certain extent on the technical aspects of Freud’s work that Saville studied during her university studies, but they include the aspect of self-examination and concurrently exhibit a careful analysis of the human flesh. Although both artists share the same themes, Saville extends it to new feminist borders.

Saville’s paintings are huge, with their height often extending over three meters and they are covered with large nude women. She herself never sees them complete, until they are exhibited on the gallery walls. As she claims in her interviews, she often uses mirrors and photography while completing the painting. She takes a lot of photos of herself, drawing on the information about the human body from any source available. Apart from her own photos, she uses photos from her friend’s bodies as well as medical books. She never photographs the entire body but zooms in on different parts separately. Since she works on a larger scale, she never looks at the entire figure but focuses more on the details. While concentrating on different parts of the painting she combines them with each other gradually to a comprehensive whole. She claims that she is unable to paint on smaller canvases or notebooks unless she is making a detail or enlargement. She never sketches before painting the canvas, but creates the entire painting from scratch with paint. She enables in her work the use of mirrors in order to perceive her entire work as an entity. She works on scaffolding to cover all the surfaces of the painting. By placing the mirrors under above and around the painting she does not need to move all the time from her position to see something. She often paints in full dress but sometimes she has to work naked so that she can easily use her own body for any detail she may need to depict with precision, such as the physical features of the skin, the flesh, the pubic hair and their different textures.

It is her own face and body she uses in most of her paintings, although on the first glance it seems different due to the perspective. She herself says: ‘Women have usually only taken the role of model. I’m both, artist and model. I’m also the viewer, so I have three roles.’11. Working mostly with her own white body, she reinvents the socioeconomical relationship between the painter and the model. Her studio is no more the place of onesided transaction, but a space of self- examination. Through her work she manages to reconstruct the west civilisation’s opinion about the body of the painter. The body that is being represented is no more the female objectified body, but an energetic dynamic female body that is explored through self-examination and painting. In her interview she claims “I paint women as most women see themselves. I try to catch their identity, their skin, their hair, their heat, their leakiness. I do have this sense with female flesh that things are leaking out. A lot of our flesh is blue, like butcher’s meat. In history, pubic hair has always been perfect, painted by men. In real life, it moves around, up your stomach, or down your legs.’12

In an era of exercise and diet, when the biggest goal and body ideal is to be thin, many women reasonably feel bad about their excess weight and ashamed of their own bodies. The rhetoric that is being used against obesity is often more intense and make it seem way worse than alcohol and smoking, although they cause severe results. Saville does not paint large disgusting women, but women who have come to thinking they are fat and disgusting and imagine their thighs overflowing.13 Her figures are not a placed in some setting or room. It is flesh and the painting itself is the body –but the theory behind each and every piece of her work is as important as the painting itself. Through her work she is tries to create a new ideal about beauty. Beauty is usually the male consideration of the female body. Saville’s women are beautiful through their individuality, but they have been convinced to despise their own body through the social structures. She represents in her paintings something in-between reality and the perception women have, when they inspect at their own bodies in the mirror and compare it on their scales. She herself says that there is a tension in the way people look at themselves in the mirror. They take more expressions then. In front of the mirror people do things they would never publically. They recognize a certain image of themselves when they look in the mirror. 13 This is the tension she is trying to incorporate in her paintings, the way that one looks oneself in the mirror, when feeling flawed . That is the only time people might look at themselves outside any other context.

It is said that her paintings are disturbing and they could never be used as domestic ornament. But she herself has stated in her interviews that she didn’t create them with this notion but in order to be exhibited for the public at venues open to as many viewers as possible where people could relate with them.14 Most of the works of Saville, represent the constant struggle between the female body and the body ideals contemporary pop culture has been trying to force upon it. Through her work, Saville creates a new female ideal body that is different from all the ideals of the male dominated culture and represents her own female opinion and aesthetics and the way a woman looks at herself through a world full of sexual standards.

Bibliography and references

1. Davies, (1994), From an interview with the artist: This is Jenny, and this is her Plan: Men paint female beauty in stereotypes; Jenny Saville paints it the way it is. And Charles Saatchi is paying her to keep doing it. In magazine: The Indepentent

2. Cooke, (2012), From an interview with the artist: Jenny Saville: ‘I want to be a painter of modern life, and modern bodies’, In magazine :The Observer

3. Cooke, (2012), From the interview with the artist (look up n.2)

4. Rowley, (1996) On viewing three paintings by Jenny Saville : Rethinking a feminist practice of painting, p.91

5. Davies,(1994), From the interview with the artist (look up n.1)

6. Reckitt,Phelan (eds.)(2001),Art and feminism,p.186–187

7. Secondaryresearch, (2012), Jenny Saville’s Trace?, online article

8. Cooke, (2012), From the interview with the artist (look up n.2,3)

9. Rowley, (1996) On viewing three paintings by Jenny Saville: Rethinking a feminist practice of painting,p.95

10. Davies, (1994), From the interview with the artist (look up n.1,5)

11. Davies, (1994), From the interview with the artist (look up n.1,5,10)

12. Davies, (1994), From the interview with the artist (look up n.1,5,10,11)

13. Sylvester,D.,(1994)From an interview with the artist titled:Areas of Flesh, In the magazine: The Independent

14. Frank,P., (2012)Jenny Saville At Modern Art Oxford: Her First Solo Exhibition In A UK Public Gallery ,In magazine:The Huffington Post