In a discussion in front of a packed house at the Norton Museum of Art’stheater on Tuesday night, British artist Jenny Saville described her work as a “battle between feminist ideas and classical art.” Battle is an apt word for Saville’s work, which is on display at the Norton through March 4, in her very first American museum exhibition. Saville only paints people, but her paintings are as much battlefields as portraits. She is defined by a rough-hewn style of harsh, unforgiving brushstrokes, colors that occasionally bleed off her canvases and self-reflexive techniques such as pentimenti – alterations in paintings that reveal her own adjustments. All of these elements suggest paintings that are in a constant state of flux, or battle, between the artist and her medium and between the form and the content.
In terms of that content, Saville’s subject matter would ignite controversy even if it were painted with hotel-art tidiness. Deeply influenced by feminist thought, Saville’s often nude, frequently full-figured models puncture traditional notions of feminine beauty. One of her breakthroughs, 1992’s “Propped,” depicts a nude woman perched atop a stool, her head partially cut off by the top of the frame, and her striking, equine legs in the foreground. “Trace,” made a year later, shows a woman’s large, nude back, pocked with scabrous abrasions. The endless “Fulcrum” may be her piece de resistancewhen it comes to expansive skin: What appears from a distance to be a flesh-colored mountain reveals itself to be three morbidly obese figures piled atop one another.
Like the veneer of her canvases, most of Saville’s subjects are damaged in some way. She is admittedly attracted to animal carcasses, disfigurements, birth defects and sex-change post-ops, all of which are displayed in grandly oversized form at the Norton – the freak-show stuff of lowbrow culture crashing headlong into the respectability of classical portraiture. Some of her gender-neutral facial portraits, like “Bleach” and “Entry,” suggest the living equivalent of porcelain dolls, immortalized in paint moments before they crack apart.
There’s something in all of these works that is both obscene and beautiful, voyeuristic and enlightening, and it compels us to stare at images you probably can’t see on television, even at 2 a.m. on cable. Should we not be seeing these things? Or have we been programmed by society to find these images unacceptable? I hope to convey just some of their complex duality in these words; her paintings need to be seen in curated form to be fully appreciated. In a culture that is becoming more beauty-conscious by the day, Saville’s hard-to-swallow visions of glamour’s discards have an increasingly unforgettable relevance.
“Jenny Saville” is at the Norton Museum of Art, 1451 S. Olive Ave., West Palm Beach, through March 4. Call 561/832-5196 or visit Norton.org.
