If you see one art show this summer, see this

Telegraph

19-06-2025

I believe that Jenny Saville is a genius. Of the 45 works in The Anatomy of Painting, her stunning retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery – maybe the show of the summer – at least a dozen bear that out. Spanning her career from the early 1990s to the present day, the exhibition testifies to a virtuoso's flair. Saville handles form and colour with ease, and brings her subjects to glowing, shifting life. This is portrait painting as electricity.
Saville was born in Cambridge in 1970. Her work was spotted by Charles Saatchi in 1992 at a graduation show; he bought her entire collection on the spot. The picture that brought her into the public eye, Propped (1992), faces you as you enter the halls of the NPG.
Restlessness jockeys with poise: a large naked woman perches on a skinny pedestal, her head tilted back in the enigmatic expression that would become a Saville favourite. (It's partly a self-portrait, but as with most of her work, there's as much imagination as representation here.) The picture had its critics – fleshy and combative, it wasn't the kind of nude they liked – but 30 years on, it remains a thrill.
Saville 's women, especially those from the 1990s, might seem cousins to Lucian Freud's, but she owes more to Willem de Kooning and his angular female forms. 'Flesh,' he once remarked, 'was the reason why oil painting was invented.' Saville saw the Dutch-American's art when she was a student, and has recalled being thunderstruck: 'The paint was right on the surface.' Her work has, ever since, been all on the surface too; perhaps that's true of any painting, but most don't insist so hard on the fact, don't hover so skilfully in our eyeline between nature and artifice – between the picture as a portrait of life and as a mere collection of painted marks.
As Saville's career, and the NPG show, reach the early 2000s, we meet a series of giant faces. All are masterfully coloured, yet in different palettes; built around direct gazes, yet in different moods. They conjure intense emotion, but never straightforwardly. I loved Bleach (2008), in which a young woman's head is built up through rippling off-white hues; and Stare (2004-5), used on a Manic Street Preachers album cover, its little boy a landscape of deep red strokes and swells. These faces coalesce, decompose, come together again: you see the pictures themselves as living things.
Towards the present, Saville's portraits become glassier, weirder. Chasah (2020) and Prism (2020) combine smooth tones on the skin with zippy squiggles of abstract form. And then you turn, and see the knockout: Rupture (2020), one of the great paintings of our age. A woman's head rises, with eerie serenity, from a spectrum of buzzing colour: yellow glows through her cheeks, her neck boils away into green. One eye appears thin and translucent, while the other has human depth, even tenderness.
I began by calling Saville a genius: if you doubt me, go to the NPG and seek out Rupture. What you'll see in those eyes is something else.