Artist Jenny Saville: ‘You always return to beauty, in the end’

There can be few nicer ways of passing a quiet moment than sitting outside the River Cafe in London on a sunny May lunchtime, reading the menu. And then reading it again, slowly, imagining every dish. It’s going to be a hard, hard choice. 

So when artist Jenny Saville arrives, crisply dressed in a pearl grey sweater with buttoned-up grey shirt, we apply ourselves with minimal preliminaries, and it takes a while. “I only really come here for special occasions,” she says, with obvious relish. It is not until she has finally settled on the rocket and zucchini salad (with toasted pine nuts, lemon zest and pecorino, since you ask), and I reluctantly give up on the pizzetta with taleggio and nettles in favour of chargrilled squid, that we start to chat properly.

There’s so much to ask. Saville is a pre-eminently successful British artist, with extraordinary shows all over the world of her luscious yet often disturbing paintings of bodies and faces, frequently enormous, skewering norms of beauty and exploring the space between figuration and abstraction. She is a leading figure in the stable at Gagosian, the bluest of blue-chip galleries, and until two weeks ago she held the auction record for a work by a living female artist — in 2018 her 1992 self-portrait “Propped” sold at Sotheby’s in London for £9.5mn.

With that stunning work and others she had shot to prominence at her Glasgow degree show in 1992, a rare figurative painter among the concept-driven Young British Artists of the moment, and was scooped up by collector and star-maker Charles Saatchi, who put her on contract for 18 months while she prepared work for his notable 1994 exhibition Young British Artists III.

And yet. It might be fair to say that despite her success both in the market and in critical esteem, the grand institutions of her home country have been lamentably slow to respond. An exhibition at Tate? A show at the Hayward? Or the Royal Academy (although she has been a Royal Academician since 2007)? No — her first proper UK retrospective is about to be held, perhaps surprisingly, at London’s National Portrait Gallery. 

The works are about ideas as well as the painting itself, so I wanted them to mean a lot of things

Saville seems perfectly happy about this. “This show is really from my graduation onwards — around 50 works,” she says. “There are more portraits than anything, but it’s not only that — a selection of work from every show I’ve done.”

The exhibition has been a long time in the making, Saville explains, originally planned with the NPG’s previous director Nicholas Cullinan (who is now director of the British Museum) before the pandemic and the gallery’s three-year closure for a revamp. And yet, I have to ask — although these mighty renderings of human faces and bodies are clearly individual — are they really portraits? Many of her models are unidentified, the pictures bearing abstract titles such as “Fate”, “View” or “Ebb and Flow”.

“Titles are very difficult because they point you in a certain direction — mostly I only come up with a title because I have to. And the works are about ideas as well as the painting itself, so I wanted them to mean a lot of things. Especially when I’ve used my own body: they aren’t literally self-portraits.”

As for her models, they are “a variety — some people I know really well, some I’ve never met until they come to model for me, some are taken from images I’ve found. It’s gone in different ways through my journey, my painterly journey — it just depends where my work is at any one time.”

She works from photographs, her own and others’, as well as live models. “I don’t have a hierarchical snobbery that one is better than the other. It relates to my interest in Francis Bacon: he used photographs a lot, so that sort of gave me permission to do the same.”

When working from photographs, too, “I can think about the way I paint more — when you work directly from a model you don’t think so much about the way you paint or make the marks, you don’t think about the dexterity of the paint.”

Working from live models also limits the scale of a work, she points out — something I’d never thought of before. Her warehouse-scale paintings can’t exactly be balanced on an easel. But also limited, perhaps, would be her explorations into abstraction.

“I’m a painterly painter. You get curious about the way paint moves around, what you can do with it, and the works become more abstract. I have done some more radical portraits — one called “Cascade” — that pushed portraiture further than I thought I’d ever go.”

“Cascade” is a prime example of what has been called Saville’s “abstract realism”: in this huge canvas, three eyes, superbly and naturalistically rendered, gaze out at us, apparently upside down, and there’s a suggestion of a nose and other features, though some are boxed-out and disarranged, and the whole is overpainted with a blizzard of riotous colour — a mysterious but vivid fragmented portrait, if it is one, embedded deeply within other layers of thinking and seeing.

The tables around us under the terrace’s wide umbrellas have filled up by now with a smart and vivacious lunchtime crowd, the noise level is rising and the staff are flying. Our starters have arrived, and we break off for a moment to tuck in, sharing bits of the fiery squid and the subtler courgette.

Before long, though, we’re back to paint: Saville’s favourite subject. “I do these big body compositions — it’s one of my favourite ways of working — a sort of human mass. I use couples, or three women, for example, or singular bodies, bodies that are made up of body parts.

“It offers such a lot of painterly possibilities, to work like that. So the narrative, if there is one, is in the paint — the paint has to do a lot of talking.”

Is it, I wonder, a narrative about beauty and damage, even beauty and violence? Many of Saville’s depictions of women show bruises and scarrings, the marks of surgery or disfigurements — or sometimes just the violent interventions of paint. She is fascinated by sheer carnality, by obesity and all the lumps, folds, flabbiness of (usually) female flesh, but also bodies that are in, as she has said previously, “a sort of state of in-betweenness: hermaphrodite, a transvestite, a carcass, a half-alive/half-dead head”. She has painted a nude figure with a prominent penis and full silicone breasts; she has painted her own face on to a mightily obese female form; she has employed a photographer to snap her naked body squished on to glass plates.

Yet she pushes the question away, a little. “I actually really like beauty. I don’t have an anti-beauty strategy or anything like that. And I think the older I’ve got, the more permission I’ve given myself to explore beauty.”

When she was a student and in the early YBA era, the idea of the beautiful in art was very out of fashion. “It was, it was seen as a sort of cop-out.” In that conceptually driven time, “people were apologetic about being a painter — and apologetic about being interested in art history. It wasn’t seen as progressive. There’s a whole variety of art now, there are lots of ways to make art — and so many more figurative painters now than a while ago. And I think there’s a return. You always return to beauty, in the end.”

There are painters I always return to: I never stop looking at Rembrandt’s self-portraits, you learn so much

In the past Saville has described herself as a staunch feminist, and discussed fatphobia as a feminist issue. But despite her intense concentration on reassessing the female form, destroying and remaking canonised imagery, as well as the plethora of ideas evoked by her treatment of women in so many guises, her response is purely a painterly one and labels seem irrelevant — if gender studies are lurking, it’s the paint that speaks. And the history of art.

Saville’s deep interest in art history shows throughout her work — and never more than in a remarkable exhibition in 2021-22, across five museums in Florence, where she was invited to respond to some of art history’s greatest figures: Michelangelo, at the Casa Buonarroti, among them. Her creations — pietàs, madonnas and more — not only confirmed her as perhaps the greatest figure painter of the moment but someone who can skilfully interweave influences across the centuries, from Titian to Picasso, Leonardo to Schiele or Bacon.

“Every painter,” she says, “has a group of paintings you sort of carry around with you — there are painters I always return to: I never stop looking at Rembrandt’s self-portraits, you learn so much. And Titian, the way he built up flesh, especially later in his life.”

It could have been for Saville that Willem de Kooning observed that “flesh was the reason oil paint was invented”. When it comes to flesh she has done deep research, and I have to ask about some of her depictions of plastic surgery — though I quickly sense she’s rather bored of the question.

“I haven’t been inside an operating theatre since the late ’90s,” she replies, patiently. “It was only a short period but, because the work became well known, people presumed I did that an awful lot. 

“I became fascinated with plastic surgery in general because it’s to do with layers of flesh and the body — I hadn’t been to an art school where there was an anatomy section, so it was the equivalent of doing that, seeing how a body is made, which is quite fascinating.”

I ask about the sheer size of many of her paintings — they are often several metres across, and bigger when formed into doubles and triptychs.

“I’ve always just had a feeling for scale, it’s the language I developed. I like how you can get very close to the body of the paint, it’s like an abstract and the paint itself is very interesting — then you move back and you get the three-dimensional effect — it’s more like the intellectual or cerebral space of understanding that painting.” 

The sun is moving across the terrace, slanting through the umbrellas above us, and the chattering tables around us are thinning out. We’re getting hungry for our main courses, but they prove worth waiting for: a Dover sole for Saville, with zucchini flowers and green beans; for me seared scallops, arranged with anchovies, capers and spring peas.

The so-called mega-gallery has become a phenomenon now, and the industry of art is huge . . . the whole art world has completely changed

As we dive in, the conversation turns to the art market — I can hardly resist asking Saville about the spectacular prices some of her works have achieved, even though I’m sure it’ll be another question she has had to negotiate too often.

She answers very simply, though: “I try to ignore all of that. Obviously there’s a side of it that’s great, on the other side I knew early on it doesn’t help my painting get better, so I just don’t think about it all that much.

“I learnt to make a bubble to create my work in — and the gallery in return are very respectful of that. I know a handful of collectors but I don’t meet my collectors too much.”

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It was a lesson learnt early because Saville, unlike so many other artists, found success almost immediately. She was born in Cambridge in 1970 and the family later moved around England, but she chose Glasgow in Scotland for art school “because of its painterly tradition, quite exotic, and the building [designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh] was amazing, and I liked the atmosphere.”

There were other important influences too. “I went to America for the third year of my four-year course, and I saw New York and Washington, and saw what was possible. Other ways of making art, other galleries — it just felt a lot bigger. Something felt more exciting.

“Then I was extremely lucky that Charles [Saatchi] bought my work, and commissioned a body of work — every artist’s dream, really. So I took my opportunity and worked really hard and did my show at the Saatchi collection.

“And then I met Larry [Gagosian], and I didn’t know when I started doing a show there [at his gallery] that he was going to become the dealer that he did.”

So — two of the most significant figures in contemporary art at the time were Saville’s supporters. Other art-world figures spotted her talent early on, too.

“I feel extremely lucky — there was [art historian] David Sylvester, [Picasso’s biographer] John Richardson, [pioneering feminist critic] Linda Nochlin — I had a whole range of people that have been big influences on my life. And told me great stories about other artists, so that I could be in the atmosphere of other artists who had great ambitions. You kind of soak those things up.”

While many artists struggle with their gallery relationships, Saville is deeply loyal to Gagosian — she even, unusually for an artist, sits on its board. “Gagosian might have a reputation for being a very commercial gallery but from my personal experience they’ve just been incredibly supportive.

“When I joined Gagosian [in 1997] he didn’t have a gallery in London, he had LA apart from the New York spaces. He opened London a few years later. And that began what you might call the globalisation of the art world. The so-called mega-gallery has become a phenomenon now, and the industry of art is huge too. An extreme change in my lifetime.

“In fact the whole art world has completely changed — in the 1990s there were just one or two streets in London, and some public art spaces, that was it. There wasn’t the coming-together we have now, in terms of art, fashion, music.”

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We start to attack the question of art fairs, but there’s an even more pressing question: are we going to have puddings? It’s hard to resist, even though Saville is starting to worry a little about time. Still, we opt for a blood orange sorbet (me) and a nespole and almond tart (her). And four spoons. But what is a nespole? According to a helpful waiter, it’s a citrus fruit, orange-like, though in fact it’s neither — when it arrives and we both try it, it’s more like an apricot. Very delicious, either way.

It’s getting late and there’s still so much to talk about. Art fairs (pros and cons, largely pros); David Hockney (excellence of); the joys and demands of family life, and her delight in hanging out with her two children (“other than painting, it’s my favourite thing to do”); toying with the idea of sculpture; appealing to young people (“It’s lovely when someone who is 15 years old likes your work”); her show next year in Venice during the biennale (location undisclosed).

But we’re out of time and “a whole crew of people” are waiting for Saville at the NPG. And a sleek black car is waiting outside: that’s Gagosian for you.

Jan Dalley is an FT contributing editor

‘Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting’ is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, June 20-September 7

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