“It is not just about the sight of the body. It’s about the feel, the touch and the smell of the body. It’s not about the primacy of vision, it’s about using paint, its materiality, in a way that can evoke tactility."
Tessellating, rippling, abundant flesh suffuses the surface of Jenny Saville’s Shift from 1996-97, the painting which announced her place in the pantheon of Contemporary art’s most important painters and singularly evinces the defiant reclamation of the female body for which she is best known. Exhibited prominently at the Royal Academy of Art’s era-defining Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi collects ion, Shift sees Saville at her very best: declarative, unashamed, resistant, renegade. Though bearing palimpsestic resonances to the nude’s centrality in the art historical canon, the women of Shift share nearly nothing with those that have preceded them. In a gluttony of breasts and belly, Saville quite literally inverts the viewer’s expectations of the female nude; we are smothered by her subjects’ totalizing frontality. Spanning nearly eleven feet in both directions, Shift impresses upon us a sense of scale, weight, and, above all, reality: whether in paint, literature, or legislation, women’s bodies have been crushed by expectation and forced into submission, made into vessels for consumption and sites of criticism. Nowhere in her inimitable corpus is her intransigent spirit and complete fluency in oil paint so colossally summarized than in the present work, and here, Saville aptly taps into the fraught tenuity of our collects ive relationship with femininity, art history, and the body.
On the opening day of Sensation, when Shift’s inclusion in the show was unveiled, complete uproar ensued. Protesters picketed outside of the museum’s entrance, and the media posted such inflammatory headlines as “Artrage!” and “Royal Academy of Porn!”; lines stretched around the Burlington House, and Royal Academicians resigned. Alongside Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde-pickled shark, Tracey Emin’s tent, Marc Quinn’s blood-soaked bust, and Chris Ofili’s portrait of the Virgin Mary, Shift was inducted into an art historical hall of infamy. Its candor proved too taboo for the t.mes : larger-than-life dimples, stretch marks, cellulite, and pubic hair lushly articulated in sumptuous strokes indulge the full range and plasticity of its material properties. From slick to sticky, opaque to diaphanous, the sheer proficiency of Saville’s facture and the certain candor of her vision leave no room for idealization. On canvas she manages to conjure the very rage in her first viewers felt by those over a century earlier at the 1865 Paris Salon, when Édouard Manet’s Olympia made its debut. Despite hysteric accusations of promiscuity and wanton flagrancy, Olympia’s viewer – presumably male – consciously continued to look at her. Male spectatorship devoured her body, just as it did with Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus, as it did Titian’s Venus of Urbino, and the issue, Saville asserts, is that the viewer never simply looks at a nude woman but demands something of her. Poreless purity had long been codified in the annals of art history, but through the women of Shift, neither venus nor nymph, Saville intervenes.
Masterworks from Sensation
So beautiful is Saville’s treatment of flesh in Shift that it seems to contradict its wincing compositional and conceptual peculiarities. The women’s luminescence evokes the glistening musculature and perspiration of Peter Paul Rubens, but under Saville’s generous dose of light and warmth also exists squished limbs, skin stretched taut over rib cages, and bruised sternums, knees, and pelvic bones. Distorting her figures to the point of discomfort, Shift evokes the image of one of Saville’s greatest influences, Chaïm Soutine’s Carcass of Beef, and in drawing the connection suggests that women, historically and systematically, are depicted, treated, and consumed as such. It is in this incongruence between form and content that the humanity of Saville’s best paintings lies: the female body can be delicate, disturbings , and beautiful; troubled, miserable, and triumphant. The crisis of womanhood, Saville asserts, is the simultaneous, unrelenting battles waged between agency and subjectivity, empowerment and self-loathing.
This dichotomy is heightened by the present work’s enormity: there is the intense vulnerability that permeates Saville’s subjects, yet their immense size belies the impression of fragility. Veering into the realm of the maternal, the figures generate a sense of child-like intimacy, but their nurturing quality is not Saville’s sole intention. Mark Rothko famously advised that his paintings should be viewed from a distance of 18 inches, and Saville says the same. Her works are meant to draw us in, envelope us, infantilize us, before returning us back into the world, enlightened and implicated all the same. Often citing de Kooning’s Woman series as a source of inspiration, Saville has said of these works that in them she “made a body that was too big for the frame, literally too big for the frame of art history… I wanted them to confront you and exist.” (the artist quoted in: Simon Schama, Jenny Saville, New York 2005, p. 127) Thus, the effect of the present work’s size is not only to dwarf the viewer, however, but to intimidate them into not only seeing the image before them but hearing the message contained therein: Shift is unequivocally argumentative.
At the command of Saville’s brush, fetish is proven facile. She takes the nude female form previously sexualized, gawked at and condemned and blows it up, liberating the body and suffocating its onlooker. In Saville’s aesthetic coup, there is no room for negotiation with the painters of the past, only staunch refutation. At long last, women are painted not as deities but as they see themselves – with every last nuance and complication captured confidently, richly, and resolutely.
