Not everyone will love Jenny Saville’s visceral art, but it makes most other contemporary figurative paintings look amateurish in comparison

To many, Saville is Britain’s greatest artist in waiting – and this sprawling exhibition is further proof

‘Reverse’ 2002-2003 by Jenny Saville (Private Collection courtesy Gagosian © Jenny Saville)

“Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented” – so said the great American abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning. And if that isn’t quite literally the case, painters have spent so much time over the past 500 years exploring the affinities between the gloopy coloured stuff and the soft tissue upholstering our bodies that De Kooning’s off-the-cuff aphorism has effectively become true. Not least among these artists is British painter Jenny Saville. Flesh in Saville’s hands isn’t the luminous, exquisitely tactile matter beloved of her great idol Titian; instead it is explored in paintings that are seductive in the sheer skill with which the 55-year-old painter wields the brush, but often challenging to the eyes and emotions. As a result, Saville has been regarded as the natural heir to the great British figurative tradition of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach – the only one of the YBA generation who can actually paint and, for more than a few, she is Britain’s greatest artist in waiting.

The fact that little has been heard of Saville during the much-discussed figurative revival of the last few years isn’t so surprising. When people are attempting something new (and I’d question how new, let alone original, most of the current British figuration actually is), the last thing they want is a leading member of the previous generation looming in the background. The Anatomy of Painting, however – Saville’s largest British museum show to date – will bring her very much to the foreground.

Judging from the earliest works in the exhibition, Saville had the technical skills from the get-go to become a highly successful conventional figurative painter. But since “conventional figurative painting” tends in our time to be written off as kitsch, she felt obliged to complicate her direct observation with several classic modernist strategies – massive scale, fragmentation and distortion – that won her immediate acclaim. In Propped (1992), a woman sits on a sculptor’s modelling stand as though her exuberantly plastic flesh is about to be manipulated into a work of art – or is, in fact, already one. She is viewed from a low angle, so that her hands and knees seem to bulge massively out of the painting. In case you somehow missed the fact that this isn’t intended to be a straight representation of reality, Saville has gouged what looks like a poem backwards across the surface of the painting with the blunt end of her brush.

In the 9ft-tall Plan (1993), we find ourselves looking up at a towering female torso on which Saville has drawn contour lines, as though creating a relief map of her subject’s “landscape”. There’s an inescapable and rather horrific sense that the layers of her body may be sliced off.

Such works brought Saville to the attention of Charles Saatchi, the stellar collector of the time, who included her in Sensation, the 1997 Royal Academy exhibition that proverbially launched the YBA generation. Saville, who under slightly different circumstances might have spent her life quietly pursuing her highly personal figuration from her Oxford studio, was established as one of Britain’s edgiest artists while still in her mid-twenties.

‘Pieta I’ 2019-2021 by Jenny Saville (© Jenny Saville, courtesy The George Economou Collection)

While Saville has never sought personal publicity, Ruben’s Flap (1998) is a good example of the ways in which she’s kept cutting to the quick of our nervous sensibilities over the intervening three decades. Her painted collaging of different views of the same naked woman draws attention to the essential abstractness of the work, to the fact that it’s a mass of dripped and smeared oil paint. Yet there’s something about the sight of someone with two-and-a-half awkwardly morphing heads that will never feel quite comfortable, no matter how much we know it’s just a tricksy bit of painting.

Saville has said it was the example of Francis Bacon that gave her “permission” to paint from photographs, and as with Bacon, the incursion of the abstract tends to read as a wounding: a sudden smear of thickly applied paint appears as a gouge or a tear in smoothly rendered flesh. There are times when this effect feels surprisingly academic. Shadow Head (2007-13) is slightly too obvious a collision of photo-realism and abstract expressionism, but Saville counters this with Witness (2009), which hangs directly opposite. The harshly lit, nearly 9ft-high face appears to be screaming in agony. It takes an effort of will to keep in mind that the explosion of blood and disfigured gums where the mouth should be is simply a piece of hyper-charged abstract painting.

‘One out of two (symposium)’ 2016 by Jenny Saville (Private Collection © Jenny Saville, Courtesy Gagosian)

Yet Saville’s attempts to square up to the Old Masters can leave her looking dangerously exposed. This is particularly evident in her painted and drawn studies of pregnant mothers and young children, inspired by Michelangelo and Titian. But her aim isn’t to draw like them (though she can do a fair approximation). The apparently random graffiti-like red chalk around her meticulous charcoal figure drawings is designed to evoke both the “ghost marks” in paintings, indicating limbs and figures present in earlier versions of a work, and what she calls “the slippage we have between the real world and the screen world” in the 21st century.

Her latest paintings give an even more perplexing sense of a world of images gone haywire. Huge portraits of young women with a magazine prettiness are rendered in saccharine colours, throwing in every painterly trick in the postmodern book. Eyes meticulously captured with the slight out-of-focusness of actual photographs peer out through blizzards of paint; gaps in the surfaces reveal earlier versions lurking beneath. If Saville has employed all these tactics before, there’s a reckless exuberance to these newer paintings that makes her earlier work look staid. The sense of confusion – or is it a highly structured interlayering? – between the authentic and the mannered, the concrete and the illusory feels redolent of a world where too many people are taking too many pictures, watching too many films, and occupied in too many realities outside of their own.

From a purely technical point of view, these paintings are often startling. The rainbow-tinged beam of light shining upward onto the subject’s face in Messenger (2020-21) is in fact dripping down the canvas. The pastel painting Prism (2020) looks hyper-real from a distance, but starts to dissolve as you approach. Not everyone will love these paintings, but whether you find them beautiful or hideous, bitingly acute or grossly superficial, they make most other contemporary figurative paintings look pretty amateurish and painfully lacking in ambition.

‘Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting’ is at the National Portrait Gallery from 20 June until 7 September