Persephone

An artist whose large-scale, visceral portrayals of the human body manage to be both intimate and explosive at the same time, Jenny Saville continues to rewrite the terms by which the human body is portrayed. In Persephone, a monumentally scaled portrait measuring nearly five feet tall, multiple perspectives shift and collide in a complex layered effect. Here, the artist’s use of pastel and acrylic paint has been rubbed and distorted to present a transient, volatile image. Invoking the myth of Persephone, the Greek goddess who lived between two worlds, Saville acknowledges that self-identity is not a choice between two binary opposites, but rather a fluid and ever-changing state of being.

Painted over a two-year span, from 2019 until 2021, Persephone belongs to an important body of work that Saville made while in Florence, Italy. It was there that a comprehensive retrospective took place simultaneously across five different locations in the Fall of 2021. This period also corresponded to the pandemic lockdowns, which seemed to heighten the artist’s understanding of the vulnerability of the human body. Paradoxically, her palette during this time became brighter and more joyful, encompassing a beautiful array of blue, pink, yellow, lavender and green tones. In Persephone, the interplay between bright, pink acrylic paint and a softer, fleshy pastel makes for a work that is nearly electrified. “I was using color like never before,” Saville reflected, describing the evolution of her work during this time. “I think it was a sort of resistance to the disease. [...] I was making marks with this sort of urgency because I thought… What’s going to happen to everybody?” (J. Saville, quoted in L. Rysman, “Jenny Saville’s Nudes Bring Renaissance Masters Down to Earth,” New York Times, October 10, 2021, p. AR19).

In the present work, Saville has created a dynamic, shifting portrait that veers from life-like representation to areas of near-total abstraction. This monumentally-scaled canvas portrays an intense psychological study of the human figure, rendered in a sumptuous palette that ranges from the soft pink of flesh to brighter “hot pink” highlights made using acrylic paint. The figure’s facial features have been finely modeled to convey an authentic, life-like depiction, especially in the eyes, nose and parted lips. Elsewhere, however, the pastel has been smeared and blurred so that the figure’s eyebrows, forehead and neck become beautiful passages of abstraction. Saville has created a layering effect, where a mosaic of different selves are nestled within each other, but also shift back and forth into being. The curator Caroline Corbetta has noted that “The pictorial matter…changes constantly before our eyes, oscillating between figuration and abstraction…” Indeed, in paintings like Persephone, Saville seems to channel “the mutability of organic life; that incessant coming into being that starts off as the coagulation of cells, grows, and acquires structure in a form…and then breaks up once more in post-mortem decomposition” (C. Corbetta, “Jenny Saville: Painting the Truth, in Jenny Saville, Lombardy, 2023, p. 195).

Throughout her career, Saville has challenged the art historical representation of women’s bodies in order to reclaim some of their power for herself. Beginning in 1993, with her seminal masterpiece Plan, in which she depicted a dramatically foreshortened portrayal of her own nude body, Saville established herself as a daring new painter of the controversial group of Young British Artists (YBAs). She continues to provoke both controversy and acclaim with her unflinching portrayals of the female body, which she has studied in depth, even working with plastic surgeons and bodies in a morgue. These depictions help to broaden the traditional category of figurative painting, and give agency to the legions of women portrayed in Renaissance paintings, who were ultimately empty receptacles for men’s desire.

In her more recent body of work, Saville’s portrayals may fluctuate between two traditional gender lines, to represent a self that defies conventional definition. In Persephone, she invokes the Greek myth of the seasons, referring to the goddess who was kidnapped by Hades and brought down to the underworld, where she was forced to live for six months out of the year. Like the Greek goddess, Saville’s portrayal straddles two different worlds—past and present, male and female, human versus myth. “Saville does more than reclaim women’s corporeal power,” the poet and art critic Rachel Spence has written. “Often her bodies flit back and forth across traditional gender lines” (R. Spence, “Jenny Saville in Florence - A Renaissance Reclaimed,” Financial Times, October 26, 2021, online).

Jenny Saville’s references are myriad, ranging from Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon to Cy Twombly and Willem de Kooning. It is within this recent body of work, painted in advance of the Florence retrospective, that Saville’s paintings confronted the legacy of Michelangelo, particularly with his masterworks housed in the Opera del Duomo, Casa Buonarroti and the Salone dei Cinquecento. Saville immersed herself in these Renaissance paintings, zeroing in on certain aspects of Michelangelo’s work, whether in the tilt of the head or a hand resting on flesh. “I work on what visually fascinates me,” Saville explained. “if it visually fascinates me, there must be some truth in that. [...] It’s unfashionable to speak about truth, but there is something in my work about seeking universal truths. [...] If you want to be good, you have to work at it all your life. The subject of the human body, it’s more than enough for a lifetime” (J. Saville, in conversation with Francesca Lombardi, in “Exclusive Interview with Jenny Saville,” Firenze: Made in Tuscany, Vol. 67, October 1, 2021, online).