Jenny Saville

0:00Hello, I'm John Wilson. You're about to listen to This Cultural Life. Episodes are released weekly, wherever you get your podcasts. But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episode first on BBC Sounds, seven days earlier than anywhere else. Do subscribe to This Cultural Life on BBC Sounds and make sure you have push notifications turned on and we'll let you know as soon as new episodes are available.

0:31Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which some of the world's leading artistic figures discuss the most significant influences and experiences that have inspired their own creativity. I'm John Wilson, and my guest in this episode is the painter Jenny Saville, renowned for large-scale portraits of fleshy naked women. She made her name soon after art school, when paintings that she'd made for her graduation exhibition were bought by the collector Charles Saatchi. In 1997, her work was also part of the landmark Royal Academy show Sensation, alongside now iconic pieces by Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and others.

1:08Since then, the main focus of her work, which is shown in museums and galleries all around the world, has remained the female form. In 2018, a Jenny Saville painting called Propped sold at auction for£9.5 million, at the time a world record for a work by a living female artist. Jenny Saville, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you. You are one of the world's preeminent painters. Why oil paint? What does it offer you as an artist? There's no other colour like it in terms of the depth of colour that you can create. I've tried using acrylic, sometimes I use watercolour, but it doesn't have the density of pigment.

1:50And I think it's just my knowledge has grown over the years of ways to move paint around. And the artists I like from the past have used oil paint, so I think there's a long history and trajectory of using that kind of medium. What about painting as a practice? Because, of course, in the early 90s when you first emerged, contemporary art was going through a real conceptual revolution and figurative painting was deemed to be old-fashioned. Did it feel at the time that you were going against the grain? Not really. I went to an art school that had a big painting tradition. As I went through art school, there was a growing awareness that this wasn't such a cool medium to use and it was so historically laden and a lot of conceptual artists were much more well-known and there was a lot of excitement about what was going on in London.

2:37But it's just my language. That's when I feel most at home is in that language. You were born in Cambridge in 1970, but I believe you lived in various parts of England during your childhood. What did your parents do, first of all? Well, both were in education. My mum was a teacher. She was actually my primary school teacher. I think it's one of the reasons I became an artist, actually, because when she was in her classroom at the end of the day, I was hanging around. and so I'd start just making things or playing with materials in the room and it was a very creative upbringing I had. My father became a director of education but started out as a teacher and I was in Suffolk for the first decade of my life and it was a very free, open, happy childhood really where I'd be out on my bicycle all day long and creativity was absolutely at the core of what my parents believed in.

3:31At what age did you really start to become passionate about painting? I have a very conscious feeling from about eight years old that this is just what I did. I just made things or spent my time doing that. I think my mum was getting annoyed that I was messing up the house, to be honest. So she gave me this sort of broom cupboard and said, you can do whatever you want in there. So I would go in there in the morning and paint on the walls. I would make drawings, I would build things out of cardboard and that's how I spent summer holidays, things like that. And that was your room? Yeah, that was my room.

4:08Nobody else was allowed in? I don't know. People would come and go. Nobody wanted to go in probably. When you started to take the thing seriously, who really encouraged your interest in art? My father definitely, I think he took some of my work to show my uncle who was an artist and taught art at a college in Oxford and he just started to, you know, I'd go there at half terms, I'd go on different trips with him, you know, we'd go to Hastings or to an old disused canal that he was... I'd just basically accompany the students that he was teaching. How old were you then at that time, do you think?

4:42I must have been about 12 when I started going down there. I came from a Quaker family, traditionally, and there was, I think, that that education for its own sake was very much part of the background that I came from. So it wasn't that you went to study something that would get you money at the end, or there was a sort of encouragement to do something that you were very interested in rather than something that was related to finance. That was definitely part of my family background. And if you were tagging along on these trips with your uncle, were there artists that you saw for the first time with him?

5:17Oh, many. I mean, later on we went to Amsterdam to look at Rembrandt, And it was on trips like that where we would go to Rembrandt's house and then I'd see the bridges that he'd drawn and just the atmosphere of being there. He really helped me bridge the gap between, because when you're very young and you see grand art, it's quite distant from you. You know, because one, I didn't understand all the biblical stories or everything that was going on in the pictures, but I loved the paint. And what he also did is showed me the life of that artist. You know, like we would go to the bar that he drank in, for example.

5:54The Rembrandt? Yeah. Really? Well, I mean, he told me that it was a sort of gin bar. And we would go there. And so I'd sort of see the atmosphere of what the life of the artist was. And that was critical because it wasn't just the pictures. It was how it made that life a plausible life for me. It fleshed out the character of the artist more than just looking at the paintings. and that was a gift actually.

6:27On This Cultural Life, Jenny Savile, my guest choose the most important creative influences and experiences and your first choice is seeing an exhibition of the work of Lucian Freud at the Hayward Gallery in 1987. What do you most remember about this show then? I think Freud showed a lot of my generation away. You know, there was Auerbach, Bacon and Freud. That was the sort of trio that if you're interested in painting in the UK, and figurative art especially, that's kind of who you looked at. They were in the magazines and the Sunday supplements that you'd get at the weekend and you'd sort of fall upon their work.

7:03And Bacon was so incredibly individualist in terms of what he did. His language was so particular. I loved it, but I just, I couldn't unlock it in the same way that you could see with Freud. Freud was much more accessible. And I think in that exhibition, I loved the journey where he moved from quite tight work early on. And it was interesting. At the beginning, I liked the sort of middle section of his career where he uses a dry brush. And then the later section seemed very chewy at that time for me. And then as you grow and you realize how sophisticated that chewy kind of work is, you know, all layered up, thicker painters.

7:43That's very impasto. Very impasto. how good that is. But at the time, I loved the sort of big, glossy, dewy eyes that he did in those middle pictures. So you knew of Freud before you saw this exhibition in 87? Yeah, I did, yeah. I went deliberately to London to see it. I went on a train with a friend of mine from school. And that was just before going to art school. They're not as I remember them. Some are not as I remember them. They're quite a lot done from the same, similar subjects or the same people, say. And I've been quite interested to see them together and see how they look together. Do you have aspirations or wishes for how people will react to the work, seeing it together?

8:26No, I don't care at all. I hope a lot of people will go. I naturally, because there is a megalomaniacal side to nearly all artists, I hope they'll be affected in some way. It wasn't only me. There was a whole generation of people who just... Every life room had Freud books on the floor. You know, Freud showed everyone the way to paint a figure in a kind of gritty way, in a way that had a realism that spoke a lot about living in the UK at that time, I think. What about the scale of the paintings? It's one thing that people talk about your work, and obviously Freud is the artist who is probably most commonly cited as a reference point when people discuss your work.

9:06I think he was a reference point of my early work. But not so much later on. But particularly that study, the study of the human body, the way the paint is layered to resemble human flesh. How much do you think that experience of seeing that exhibition had a direct impact on your own style? Oh, for sure. Absolutely. I mean, there's just no doubt about that. When I look back at my early pictures, I think, gosh, you were so influenced by him. But you change and you get influenced by other painters. you know I went to America I got influenced much more by de Kooning, Twombly you know I was going to Paris looking at Monet you see lots of artists and each one of them sort of gives you something.

9:49Like Freud your recurring subject has been the human body throughout your career and at the very start you started with your own body what was the decision process behind that? One is that I'm around all the time so so that makes life easier uh I think as well there was a a sense of being a female in art history you're so often the model the one who's observed and as a painter you spend your whole life observing that's the sort of nature of it so I think I I wanted to acknowledge that in in the work so that was one of the decisions it wasn't really a decision but it was a realisation as I was doing it that there was something empowering about doing that.

10:33And also the fact that you were posing naked a lot of the time and your subjects were naked. Was that because you were trying to reclaim something about one of those recurring motifs of art history, the female nude? I don't know if it's reclaiming, but it was a sort of twist in the story, maybe. I mean, that sounds so grand because, you know, you've got to remember I'm like 20 years old or something i i was ambitious in my work without a doubt but i think i was i was just trying to find my way through it you know there's such a tradition of painting the nude as in you know from giorgione to titian all the way through art history and so that just became and that you know and then i'd seen freud show and there was a great permission for nudity it wasn't something that was odd or it wasn't and that atmosphere wasn't there

11:29your next choice for this cultural life are those months that you spent in america as part of your fine art degree course at the glasgow school of art and the third year of your four-year course was spent at the university of cincinnati and you say it was a life-changing experience for you why well i'd always had a fascination for america because um you know the movies and and the art that was coming out of America. I just always wanted to go. I'd been to Paris and seen what had happened in Paris, and New York was the sort of next place. So I didn't realise, actually, how... It seems crazy now because we're all so aware of everything on our telephones, but I didn't realise exactly how far Cincinnati was from New York.

12:12It's an awful long way. But it was exciting, nevertheless. You know, it wasn't a fancy college. It was a state university. it really showed me what was possible in my life. You know, you have those moments in your life where you can see beyond yourself. You look at the sort of Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, that group of artists, you know, they had very big ideas, made big paintings. It was just thrilling to be in the atmosphere of that, exciting with the buildings and the light. And, you know, I went to Washington DC to the museums there and then I went to New York and I just, I felt, okay, this is an atmosphere I like.

12:47I want to be part of this, if you like. And what about the academic studies? How different were the courses that you were taking in Cincinnati to the way you'd been studying in Glasgow? Well, Glasgow is an absolutely fantastic place to go. It's got a wonderful art library, but it's an art school only. It's not with a university, academic university. And so in Cincinnati, the art department was actually quite a small aspect of the university. And I took a lot of different courses. They handed me this giant book at the time, which was like an old telephone directory with different courses. And you could flick through and take anything to add up the credits that you needed to make this course.

13:28And so I took a variety of courses and went to lots of lectures. And it was exciting to have another dimension to what I was studying at the time. What sort of dimension? What were you learning? What was the new aspect? Well, I went to a lecture one day in a department, which was a gender studies department. And I started to read books and learn about that aspect. You know, gender studies was not a big subject in the UK at the time, at least I wasn't aware of that. and so I started to go to a few lectures. I went to this sort of colloquium and hear stories, learnt about poets, writers. Mostly it was to do with literary criticism rather than art and then I learnt a lot about conceptual artists at the time that were working around that subject and then I found Cindy Sherman, who I didn't know before and I thought she was a fantastic photographer.

14:23I loved her film stills and so that combined with the painting that I was also seeing just created an atmosphere that was very exciting. Cindy Sherman, of course, another artist, conceptual American artist who consistently throughout her career has used her own body, her own face and her image and distorted it with photographs. But you were still painting in Cincinnati. You weren't tempted to change your practice in any way. I did a little bit. I started taking photographs, I made casts but I just felt, I always describe it as feeling homesick because it was, I just didn't feel myself so I just had to work out a way to do this or speak about this in paint.

15:06In a note that you sent to us, you said that it was whilst you were studying in Cincinnati that you first read Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, a book that changed your life. How? I actually think as well it reminded me of this broom cupboard I had as a kid. You know, that actually I felt very empowered in that space. That was the room of your own. Yeah. I mean, that is what a studio is. Yeah. A studio is a little bit like a sort of laboratory or somewhere where you're curious and you play around. And I don't feel so different now. Obviously, my technique is much more sophisticated, but so different from when I was a child doing that.

15:44Because it's a very playful act, painting. and you get a lot of joy from putting one colour next to another or moving things around and so that reinforced my feeling about that. And Virginia Woolf was writing about empowerment. As a writer that's very easy when you're in a room of one's own with a piece of paper. For women artists at the time in which Virginia Woolf was writing it was very different and very difficult. I think that's why we've got such a great tradition of women writers in this country because you could do it in a domestic setting, you don't need a lot of space to write. Obviously, you need time.

16:17But if you want to make very large paintings, you need space. You need to be able to rent buildings. And, you know, there's still a sort of somewhat of a resistance, or there was at the early part of my career anyway. What about the influence of those gender studies courses, the feminism that you were learning about on your understanding of art history, which, of course, I presume the way you'd understood it and learnt about it up to that point had been such a sort of male-dominated version of art? I actually hadn't questioned it. I hadn't really questioned that. I just liked the art from the past a lot and hadn't really noticed that there were not a lot of women in those books.

16:53It gave me an extra fuel, I would say. I had a real sense of purpose when I came back from America and I was writing a thesis at the same time. And so all of that debate kind of added up to being in my fourth year and then I made my degree show, which just the pieces in a puzzle, I could feel them coming together. It was a very exciting trajectory of time. Your Glasgow Art School degree show paintings all sold out immediately and attracted the attention of Charles Saatchi. Saatchi signed you up to create a whole new set of paintings, as I understand it, to be shown in his gallery. What was the deal that you struck with him?

17:31Well, I mean, the trajectory of that time was probably one of the most exciting times in my life, really, because I won this thing called the Newbery Medal, which they give to the best art student of the year. and then I sold my work which you know I'd never really had any money and I got myself to the limit of finance to make the work for my degree show and then the Times newspaper did an article about recent graduates and put my painting on the cover and I had a show in London and I'm not exactly sure even now which is the first piece Charles saw but he got in touch with me and flew me to London and he also went around and purchased the work in the degree show.

18:12And that happened in quite a short space of time. So he bought it off the people who had bought it from you from the show. Yeah, but quite quickly, not like a year later or anything like that. And I went to London and met him in the gallery and he basically said you can make whatever you want. Just, you know, dream as big as you like and make whatever paintings you want over, I think it was two years. And you were given, what, a wage to paint? I think there was a periodic amounts of money. And also I won this thing called the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, which was a sort of fund, and that helped me through that period.

18:47It wasn't like lots and lots of money or anything like that, but it was an incredible opportunity. I knew how lucky I was, how fortunate that opportunity was, and I just got hold of it and just got to work, really. You weren't concerned about the deal at all, about what he was going to get from you, what you had to give in return. I was way too naive for that. Right. I was just excited that anybody wanted to buy my work at all at that time. You know, you graduate from art school. You're very idealistic about making art. And there's somebody there who, you know, I always wanted to make even bigger paintings than I had in my degree show.

19:21And there was somebody there saying, you can make them as big as you like, and I'm going to buy them. And without even seeing them first. What did you know of him? Because, I mean, he already had the Boundary Road Gallery, the St. John's Wood Gallery at the time, the Saatchi Gallery. But he was still known primarily as an ad man, wasn't he? Well, actually, I didn't know him as that. I knew him as the person who collected Cy Twombly. And I only really knew him as an art collector. I didn't really know him as an advertising person. So you regarded him as a patron? Yeah, I didn't see a negative side.

19:50I didn't have people who would advise me against him at all. I mean, I didn't have that kind of structure around me. This was not London, this was Glasgow. I'd just graduated, I was 21 years old. I was naive in that sense, in terms of the art market or career. I didn't think of any of those things. You were shown at the Sanchi Gallery in 1994 and one of the paintings on show there was the piece called Plan, which is we see a naked woman gazing down at the viewer and the body is marked with contours like a topographical map. Right. But they're also reminiscent of the lines, the markings made by a surgeon before liposuction.

20:33You actually went and observed surgical procedures, didn't you? Yeah, but not then. That was afterwards I observed plastic surgery. But was that a reference in that painting to those? Oh, yeah, very much. I mean, I'd found, I think it was Cosmopolitan magazine, I'd found a picture of target marks on a stomach and I thought that they looked like contour markings for a map of a mountainous area. And I just immediately saw a possibility in that. The correlation between landscape and the human body and the sort of mountainous areas of where a stomach is was interesting and that was a sort of pivotal picture.

21:10A graduate of Glasgow School of Art, Jenny Saville is one of Britain's most celebrated young artists. At 24 years of age, she's taken the art world by storm. Famous for her huge female nudes, her artistic debut last year at London's Saatchi Gallery caused a media sensation. Well, when I first walked into the exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery, I mean, I felt like a mountaineer confronted by the north face of the Aigo, you know, with this many large blobs of flesh in front of you. You, the spectator, I mean, you can only think of almost climbing these pictures, let alone looking at them. The critics have talked about her painting big, fat, ugly women or monstrous women.

21:53Now, those are very indicative words of people's, not description of the paintings, but description of their anxiety in confronting images of this scale. Were you seeking to promote debate about body image with those paintings, those images of larger women? No, I don't work to seek debate. I was never making work about surgery or cosmetic surgery as a comment on whether we should or shouldn't do something. That wasn't the sort of backbone of the work. I just found that fascinating, the image, the organization of a mass, if you like, and why we would do this. I could feel the culture of that was growing.

22:36I mean, it's huge now. You know, liposuction, when I first showed that picture, I had to describe what liposuction was to every single person I met because no one knew that word. You have to understand that was a very different atmosphere to now when teenagers get Botox on a Saturday afternoon. We live in a different era now where that's become very much commonplace. What were you really hoping to encapsulate with those representations? Or was it just an exploration of the flesh? I paint until they are the way they have to be. you know it's a journey making a painting it's always is from the moment you start to um lay something down one mark after another mark it's a sort of sequence of you solve one problem then you solve another and and in terms of like visually building and structurally building a body so i photographed my own body with all those markings on and once i had like several of those images you're in the process of making the painting so you get sort of lost in that process of making the painting.

23:36And I don't make my work thinking, oh, this is how the audience will perceive this, because I can't possibly imagine how anybody else thinks. But I think you do work thinking that hopefully there'll be a connection. And that's the best you can hope for, really. There was a huge connection in 1997 when your work was included in The Sensation Show, mounted by Charles Sarchik at the Royal Academy, alongside Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, Mark Quinn, Chris Ophillian, and all of that generation of artists known collectively as the Young British Artists, the YBAs. And the work that was on show there was propped, an enormous painting, naked female figure sitting, looking quite uncomfortably propped on a high stool.

24:20Was that one that you'd done at Glasgow? Yeah, it was in my degree show. So in Sensation, most artists were represented by several works. I think I had about eight paintings, something like that, in Sensation. There are two paintings that are sort of better known of my work now that were in my graduation show with Branded and Propped. Propped was the last piece I did for my degree show and the quote is a quote from a French feminist writer. I wanted the idea that a female body is put on a pedestal to look at, to observe, and it's almost like a bird. The way I've painted it is with the heeled shoes and the connotations that that brings in language of women as birds or chicks.

25:08Impropter was a self-portrait. Well, I used my own body for that painting. It wasn't a self-portrait in a traditional sense. The way that I looked at it was that I lent my body to myself for that picture. I've made other pictures that I would say are more self-portraits, but in the end that becomes kind of semantics. And what is the distinction that you would make between a self-portrait and a portrait for which you have posed, but it's not necessarily a self-portrait in that, by the terms of that definition? I think earlier on there was much more of a conceptual drive in my work. And then as I developed, I just became much more painterly and the language of painting became much more, you know, what I was interested in.

25:52I paint myself. I'm not a size 10, but I'm not an enormous body. I want to play on that perception that you believe your body is enormous, that you believe your thighs are six feet wide and are full of this pollution fat, a substance that is just an alien substance to your body. In order for women to have control over their own self-management, is seeing that you have to almost strip yourself down to the bone, that any excess is to do with lack of control. That painting Props, which you made for your degree show in 1992, sold at auction in 2018 for, I think, just over£9 million, setting a world record for a work by a living female artist.

26:41Could you have imagined at the time when you made it that it would become such a highly valued work in the future? Absolutely not. I mean, I didn't even really know what an auction was. I thought auctions were for furniture when I was at art school. I didn't have a concept of art auctions in a sophisticated way. I was quite idealistic about that. And finance was just not part of... It was really hand-to-mouth. It was about trying to get enough materials to make the work you wanted to make. That was it. And once a painting's out in the world, It's out of your hands. You can't really control what the market's going to do or not do.