Jenny Saville and the Dynamics of the Art World

Waldemar Januszczak wrote a review of Jenny Saville's retrospective in Oxford in yesterday's Sunday Times, which he seems to have generally liked.  

However, one of the points that he makes is that her work has largely been off the art radar in the last couple of decades.  In my previous posting here I mentioned that she doesn't get a look-in in a big new show on women artists at her Alma Mater, Glasgow School of Art, and that the Oxford show is her first solo show in the UK.  And yet she's a big name.  How does that add up?

Well, it's all down to, as Januszczak puts it, 'the dynamics of the art world'.  Saville was discovered by Charles Saatchi in the 1990s, then represented by the Gagosian Gallery, and thus became a valuable commodity and a brand to invest in.  Her paintings were snapped up and squirrelled away from public gaze by rich collectors.  So she paints away, and has done for a couple of decades, but only for those with the cash.  It's a strangely invisible career.

I also talked recently about Art No-one Can See.  What's the point of making art only to deliberately hide it?  However, whereas the statues that are dropped to the bottom of the ocean are intended to be hidden, Saville's art is not created with that intention.  But early success seems to have had the same effect, of hiding her work and creativity away, although her art has been seen by a small elite audience rather than no audience at all (until now).

Which is a shame for someone who is a fine draughtsman and has a feminist message.  Here she is with her writhing babies. 

Jenny Saville, Study for Pentimenti II (2011)

It takes a woman to draw babies that don't keep still, and of course the drawing makes reference to every male-painted Madonna and Child that's ever been created. However, by putting herself centre stage and referencing art history, she does of course set herself up as the figure of the Mother of Christ, which is quite a big statement to make.

Also, there's a certain lack of engagement there.  Yes, children are all wriggly - but it's all observation (and I'm not sure what her son is going to think about that image when he's 14...), lacking in warmth.  The children come across as just unwilling models.  In fact, there's something quite threatening about the restraining hand around the oldest child's throat, and the feeling is that the composition is about to burst apart.

To show you what I mean, here's Caravaggio's take on a similar theme.

 Caravaggio, Holy Family with St John the Baptist (Oil on canvas, 1602-4)

It's observation, with lots of beautiful little details, such as the dirty fingernails of Mary's working hands...

 Caravaggio, Holy Family with St John the Baptist (detail) (Oil on canvas, 1602-4)

But it also observes the inner as well as the outer, by showing, with a small gesture,  the naughtiness of a never-still child that has to be restrained by the long-suffering Joseph...

Caravaggio, Holy Family with St John the Baptist (detail) (Oil on canvas, 1602-4)

..as well as the tenderness between child and mother, through this small detail of hands, where Christ is fidgeting with his fingers behind his mother's neck...

Caravaggio, Holy Family with St John the Baptist (detail) (Oil on canvas, 1602-4)

The circularity of the composition also suggests a whirling movement, that everyone has just about managed to stay still enough and out of trouble enough for one second for the artist to record the scene, because family life is always in constant motion, but always bonded together (although, being Caravaggio, you'll notice that there is a dark centre at the heart of the painting).

As for the title of Jenny Saville's drawing, 'Pentimenti' (the word means where you can see that an artist has changed their mind in a painting or drawing by altering, say,  a line or a figure), it's obviously referring to the numerous lines trying to draw the continually-moving children.  However, it inevitably also plays upon the idea of a change of mind about the whole motherhood thing.  After all, the combination of motherhood/artist is a perpetually thorny one.  It takes you out of the art market and reduces your worth. 

But, muses the Financial Times (with no sense of irony) does all this having-it-easy patronage remove the emotional heart of the work?  They found, despite the scale of the paintings, that there was no sense of conflict or struggle (despite Saville's interest in the really big themes of life and death, gender and identity), and that it was all just a bit too unchallenging.  Meat without the meatiness.  Hoorah for women painting women, and not making them look like Renoir's sugar-coated Play-doh girls, but is her work all just mere observation?  Unless there's the emotion, getting underneath all those mountains of flesh and wriggling limbs, you don't feel the connection.

Do artists, then, need to starve in a garret to produce really exciting and emotionally genuine work?  Or once you expose them to the safe waters of financial success, do you dilute the very thing that made them desirable in the first place?

Jenny Saville's show is on until September 16th at Modern Art Oxford and the Ashmolean Museum.  See it and decide for yourself.

Andy Murray - Champion, No - Hero, Yes

Ok, so this isn't art, and it's just a tennis match, but I'm going to give Mr Murray a mention anyway.

When I asked my son just before the match started who he was cheering for in the Wimbledon Men's Final, he said Roger Federer.  Very surprised, I asked why, and he said well, Roger's a nice guy and a great player, and I don't want Andy to win and be taken over by all the media hype about winning in Jubilee year, and Olympic year, and making Britain proud and so on, it wasn't fair.  I thought it a pretty strange thing to say.

However, before the match there was a huge build-up on the BBC, interviewing the great and good in the crowd, showing little films where tennis greats of the past wished Murray good luck (although I'm doubtful that he would see them, so I'm not quite sure what the point of them was or who they were aimed at), and generally banging on and on about History About to Be Made.  It was pretty uncomfortable to watch.  It was indeed as if Murray was being expected to make everything fall neatly into place in the Great British 2012 storyline.

Well, you all know the result.  Real life isn't neat like that.

It was a great effort.  A heroic effort.  But Federer is one of the true all-time greats, and when the roof went over due to rain, he stepped up a gear with the serves and off he went.  He was just the better player. 

 Picture: BBC

So far, so disappointing.  A nation audibly deflated (well, those who weren't watching the Formula 1 on the other channel).  

And so the presentation ceremony swung into action.  But then a strange thing happened.

Andy, not known for his emotion, charisma or eloquence in interviews - he likes to play things very close to his chest and keep it all reigned in to the point of brusqueness -  was asked to take the mike and say a few words.  He struggled to gain his composure. He was crying. A nation held its breath and leant forward on the sofa (well, those who weren't watching the Tour de France on the different other channel).

 Picture: BBC

In all the manufactured drama, here was suddenly a real flood of genuine emotion.  This was something unscripted, something completely unexpected.  The seconds ticked by as he struggled to compose himself.   "I'm getting closer" he said, his voice breaking and vulnerable.  He gret.  And suddenly we were all greeting.  Buckets, without really knowing why.  In all the scenarios of how things were going to turn out, this outpouring wasn't one of them.

Picture: EPA

And suddenly the most important thing wasn't to win to order, to fit a media storyline - the most important thing was to have done your very best, and to lose magnificently.

Yes, Federer may have won 7 times and be truly great.  But sometimes, losing's ok too.  And my 12 year old is right - sometimes you need to win on your own terms, in your own time.

The Friday Spot - Wife vs Secretary

I'm going to mention my brother-in-law here, whose band Wife vs Secretary was featured on Marc Riley's Radio 6 Sessions.

(I'll leave you to guess which one's the brother-in-law...)

Born out of previous bands V-Twin and 1990s, this new band is named after an old Clark Gable and Jean Harlow film that they have all sworn never to see, and has been described as sounding like "Captain Beefheart waylaying Bruce Springsteen in a dark corner with a bottle of whisky".  Woo-hooh!

Judge for yourselves on Youtube.

Composition and the Golden Section

You've probably heard of the 'Golden Section' or the 'Golden Ratio' in relation to art and the composition of a painting.

Put simply, the Golden Section - also called 'Phi' and equal to 1.618 -  refers to the aesthetic rule that a composition will look pleasing if there are certain proportions underpinning it.  Which basically boils down to 'things look good when they are roughly in thirds'. Here's what I mean:

You can view a short video about how to draw the Golden Section (or Golden Ratio) HERE.

Imagine that the rectangle above is a landscape painting.  Theoretically, if you put a tree on the black vertical line (for example), it'll look good and the painting will 'balance'.

It seems that ours brains are 'hard-wired' to make sense of the world by looking at the patterns which underpin it, whether we consciously realize that those patterns are there or not.  So even if we look at an abstract painting, we can make sense of it by referring subconsciously back to the patterns which we have seen in nature, and we will find some abstract patterns more pleasing than others because they more closely follow these rules of proportion.  It's called neuoraesthetics.

One experiment in Canada, for example, asked volunteers to look at an abstract painting by (amongst others) Miro, and then a slightly different version of the painting, and asked them which looked more pleasing (read the paper here).  

Here's the paintings - which do you prefer?

Miro's genuine Bleu 1 is on the left, with its red lozenge carefully balanced on the golden section.

The maths of the Golden Section is very very interesting, and has fascinated mathematicians, philosophers, painters, architects, scientists, biologists and thinkers for centuries.  As I've said, it has a basis in nature, whether it be the proportions of a curve of a shell or the petals of a flower, or the spirals of a galaxy... 

It can be applied to music.  It can be found in architecture, such as the Pyramids at Cheops (I've been inside one of the pyramids at Giza - surprisingly hot down there) and the Parthenon in Athens...

..and in the famous double-helix (like DNA strands, life itself) staircase at the Vatican (the one you can ride your horse up) (or down)...

It can even be found in the stock market, where it is found in the complicated patterns of Fibonacci numbers, and used in market strategies such as Fibonacci retracement.

But back to paintings.

I tend to paint on a square canvas, or just off square (24" x 26" for example).  Lots of Scottish artists paint on a square - I'm not sure why.  When painting a landscape, a square format will give a dynamism to the composition, as you have very dramatic diagonals and a strong central focus.  Perhaps that's something that suits the Scottish temperament.

Traditionally, canvasses were rectangular.  If you see an Old Master that's square, it's usually because it's been cut down.  Painting on a square format is a pretty modern idea.  Degas uses it, for example in his Portrait of Edmond Duranty in the Burrell Collection in Glasgow.

Edgar Degas, Portrait of Edmond Duranty (Pastel and tempera on canvas, 1879)

Have a look at where the vertical lines for dividing the painting into thirds come.  On the right at the bottom, it's where Degas' signature is on the book.  On the left, further up, there's a black vertical line just above Duranty's shoulder.  Going back to the right, further up, the golden section is at the edge of a pile of books or papers resting on a shelf. 

Taking the painting horizontally, there is a bookshelf going across the golden section horizontally in the top third, and in the bottom it draws attention to the awkwardly clawed hand, increasing the power of the gesture.

Your eye is thus led into the painting, moving around the composition from side to side and up and down like a tennis match.

The square format, as I said, means that you have dramatic diagonals.  Imagine the diagonals drawn from corner to corner.  

In the top right of the painting, you have nothing but orderly bookshelves.  That's half the painting with nothing going on, nothing of the subject that the painting is about.  But by devoting half the painting to the books, they do actually add to our knowledge of the sitter.  They are almost about to fall down upon and engulf Duranty -  they emphasise his scholarliness, his 'bookishness'.  They speak of his knowledge, but also of a certain fragility, of him about to be overwhelmed almost.

The bottom left diagonal has all the action squashed into it, all the scattered, disorderly papers, the sitter himself.  And guess where the diagonals interesect?  On the gesture of the two fingers pressed against the temple, emphasising the mind, the brain behind the man.

The format therefore adds hugely to our knowledge of the sitter himself.  Degas exploits the qualities of the square to suggest the nature of Duranty's character.  Clever, eh?

Vincent Van Gogh used a double square format excusively in the weeks before his death, in the summer of 1890. 

 

 Vincent Van Gogh, Wheat Fields with Crows (Oil on canvas, July 1890)

It's almost as if he's trying to double the drama. 

Vincent Van Gogh, Undergrowth with Two Figures (Oil on canvas, June 1890)

A double square format used with a landscape could easily end up looking like a big sandwich, but look how Van Gogh keeps the tension there, playing with the proportions and the centres and keeping your eye moving.  It's a very restless type of format, as there are two centres, and two squares to read round, two squares playing off each other.  It's a big statement to make.

Vincent Van Gogh, Wheat Fields Under Clouded Sky (Oil on canvas, July 1890)

When I'm painting, these 'rules' of composition are in my mind, but it's not so calculating that I get out a T-square and start measuring the golden section.  Instead, you go by your instinct, and trust your own eye.  If it pleases you, it stays.  If it doesn't, you change it.  Sometimes you can't quite analyse why it isn't pleasing you, but you just know you've got to change it or else it will always bother you when you look at that particular painting again.  

The golden section may be an almost mystical mathematical formula which underpins aesthetics, but it doesn't mean that there's a formula for painting the perfect painting.

Gorse by the Shore with Distant Houses, Morar

Here's a cheery painting that I've just completed, finishing off my consignment for September's 20/21st British Art Fair...

Gorse by the Shore with Distant Houses, Morar (Oil on linen, 24 x 26)

This year there was a huge amount of gorse in bloom when I visited the white sands at Morar, along with lots of bluebells and primroses.  

It's always good to find new things in familiar scenes, so when I found this profusion of evocatively-smelling cadmium yellow flowers at the side of the road, I immediately thought of the great painting that it would make.  And here it is.

I think it's turned out to be really cheerful and uplifting.  Smell the sea air and that coconutty scent!!

Art No-one Can See

I came across this little article on the BBC website.  It's 'Why Make Art No-one Can See?' by Lucy Townsend.

From a man in Ghana who makes beautifully carved coffins (and who wouldn't want to get buried in that rather cheery giant goldfish?)

Getty Images

...to an artist who drops his sculptures deep into the sea off Mexico so that they can only be found by divers...

Jason Decaires Taylor

...to a man who buries his work beneath a sewer in a main road in Ontario, so that it can't be seen by anyone...

Judith and Norman Alix Art Gallery

...it begs the question, does a piece of art need an audience in order to be a piece of art?  Or if it isn't seen by a viewer (someone other than the artist), does it exist as art?

Instead of Schrodinger's Cat, it's Schrodinger's Art....!

Jenny Saville

Working in the studio today and listening, as usual, to Radio 4, I heard a piece on Pick of the Week (first broadcast on Radio 3's Night Waves) about Jenny Saville and her first major solo show in the UK which is opening at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

The painter Jenny Saville, photographed in her Oxford studio, June 2012. Photograph: Pal Hansen for the Observer

Saville is famously a painter of flesh; big, lined, oversized, marked corporeal female flesh that tells a story of what it is to have lived.  Her new show is an exploration of both human and animal form, living and dead, male and female.

Jenny Saville Still 2003
oil on canvas, ca. 108 x 144 in.
Gagosian Gallery

She trained at Glasgow School of Art, and was one of the big names in the art world in the 1990's (although she doesn't appear to get a mention in Glasgow School of Art's major upcoming exhibition on its female alumni 'Studio 58; Women Artists in Glasgow Since World War Two' - click the Glasgow School of Art website for more details on the show).

Saville was feted by Charles Satchi and exhibiting in the Royal Academy's Sensation show in 1997 alongside the likes of Damien Hirst.  She has built her career in abroad and in the US, and now aged 42 and with two children, she is back working in Oxford, near to the location of her retrospective.

According to the Radio 3 interview, her show in Oxford is also about the cycle of life and death, influenced, amongst other things,  by her time spent painting in a studio in Sicily near a meat market.  The show displays massive paintings of the flayed carcasses of animals, which are dead flesh, but part of the essential cycle of life.

 Jenny Saville, Torso 2 (2004,  Oil on canvas, 360 x 294 cm)

These paintings are monumental (12 foot tall), sculptural and visceral.  It takes a lot of confidence and ego (and money) to create something on that scale.  The butchered bodies twist and contort in death, and whilst full of pathos, lack the serenity and spiritual overtones of, for example, Rembrandt's similar theme (which Saville would have seen 'in the flesh' as it is Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum).

Rembrandt van Rijn, The Slaughtered Ox (Oil on canvas, 1655)

Instead, it has more of the visceral feel of Chaim Soutine's work

Chaim Soutine, Carcass of Beef (Oil on canvas, 1925)

Ah, Chaim Soutine.  Now, I must just have a quick aside here.  

Mr Soutine, as a very poor, and, by all accounts, very intense young artist in Paris in the 1920s,  admired the work on this theme by the likes of Rembrandt and Chardin, and saved up to buy an animal carcass from the slaughterhouse - the way you do.  This he hung in his studio, and did a total of ten paintings from it.   

They are convulsive, animated, agitated pieces of impastoed colour, which get at the heart of what it is to have a body, and to give it up to the process of decay.

Chaim Soutine, Carcass of Beef (Oil on canvas 1924)

This series of paintings took a bit of time, so Soutine got buckets of blood from the butcher to throw over the carcass to keep it looking fresh.  And so from death and decay came fresh colour and new art full of life.

Not that the neighbours agreed, as the stench was appalling, and the blood dripped through their ceilings, and the police were called.  Soutine argued that art came before hygiene (and apparently that also included personal hygiene, unfortunately).   

The art collector Dr Albert C Barnes (of the just-opened Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia - more of that in a future post, because I've just been there...) bought 52 of Soutine's work in a bargain-basement career-making job lot, paying the penniless artist between $15-30 per painting, depending on which one of Barne's letters you believe.  Soutine immediately hot-footed it to the south of France.  Barnes, knowing full well that he was creating a market in an artist, was now sitting on a small fortune, with keen interest from dealers.  In February 2006, an oil painting from this series 'Le Boeuf Écorché' (1924) sold for a record £7.8 million ($13.8 million) at Christies in London....

But back to Jenny Saville...

Saville seems to have aways had an interest in this cycle of life and death; she has talked of an art-historian uncle who gave her, as a child aged 11, a section of hedge in the garden and told her to observe it as it changed throughout the year, thus teaching her vaulable lessons about observation and seasonal change.  (Parents amongst you might think of your own computer-fixated bairns and raise a sceptical eye at this story, but she must have been a suitably receptive child to appreciate such a gift.)  She also had a friend photograph her as she gave birth, which I must say made me feel somewhat inadequate as part of the sisterhood, in that in my case I merely pushed out a baby and didn't turn the hospital into an art installation.

In Saville's show, which includes fresh-from-the-easel work as well as back catalogue, she also displays new paintings of Carla, a transsexual, whose modern ability to transform her body fascinates Saville.  She talked in the Radio 3 'Night Waves' interview of Carla's body being a 'landscape of gender' and a 'modern architecture of flesh'.  

Her interest lies in recording, in painterly terms, that which is between states - between life and death, or male and female, because by an understanding of one gives you an increased awareness of the other; in other words, an understanding of death makes you feel more alive.

See a slideshow of the work here.

Read more here from articles in the Guardian here  and also here.

Jenny Saville is at Modern Art Oxford and in Room 43 of the Ashmolean from 23 June to 16 September.

Hear the interview with Matthew Sweet and Jenny Saville on Radio 3's Night Waves here.