I went to see Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting at the National Portrait Gallery recently and the exhibition was swarming with teenagers. Equipped with notepads and sketchbooks, scribbling down words like “expressive”, “daring” and “beautiful”, the budding art enthusiasts seemed enraptured by Saville’s portraits: from blemished backs and wounded faces to colossal closeups of girls and fleshy nude women. I got talking to an art teacher and her sixth formers and we discussed how Saville’s bodies are the antithesis to the idealised forms we see online today; and how stunned we were by the landscape of textures that can exist within a single cheek.
Seventeen-year-old Laurence – who makes drawings with a ballpoint pen – admired the “messy side” to Saville’s work and was fascinated by “just how much emotion she could portray in one image”. His classmate Georgia, also 17, was drawn to her “vibrant colours” and felt “positively overwhelmed” by the paintings, in particular Propped, an exposing early self-portrait that was part of the artist’s Glasgow School of Art degree show. Fusing beauty and brutality, a softness and sharpness, a nude Saville sits on a precarious-looking stool (spikily jamming into her ankle), with bitten-down nails that violently claw into her skin.
