Jenny Saville
Voice of the Shuttle (Philomela), 2014-15
Oil on Canvas (dimensions unknown)
Royal Academy, London
29 January 2015

In "La Peregrina" at the Royal Academy in London, Jenny Saville RA has curated an exhibition to show the influence of Rubens on 20th and 21st century artists ranging from Picasso to Sarah Lucas.  As part of this personal response she has included a new painting of her own called "The Voice of the Shuttle (Philomela)" based on a myth depicted by Rubens (“The Banquet of Tereus”, 1636-37 Museo Nacional del Prado).

The large canvas is dominated by two decapitated heads, named Tereus and Pandion, floating above a tangle of limbs in the foreground of a blasted landscape.  Closer inspection reveals the words “jug jug” amidst the bodies in a spidery charcoal script and a child’s head on the ground to one side.  There are a few sparse abstract painted marks in the centre of the canvas in blue, brown and crimson but the majority of marks are monochrome in either charcoal or paint.  The background of the painting contains some random stains of very dilute paint.

In conversation with Tim Marlow, Director of Artistic Programmes at the RA, Saville explains that the work doesn’t directly quote from the Rubens painting but instead uses the source text from Ovid’s Metamorphoses for her inspiration.  This tells the myth of Philomela, a daughter of Pandion I of Athens who goes to visit her sister, Procne wife of the King Tereus of Thrace.  Tereus accompanies her on the journey but instead of protecting her, rapes her and when she threatens to tell her father he cuts her tongue out.  Imprisoned, Philomela weaves a tapestry that tells her story and sends it to Procne.  Horrified, Procne takes revenge by decapitating their son Itys and serves him to Tereus at a banquet.  When she reveals the head of her son, Tereus takes up an axe to kill the sisters, but the Gods transform them into birds and they take flight.  Procne is transformed into a swallow and Philomela a nightingale, because of course in nature the female nightingale is mute and only the male sings.

Without the title it would be difficult to decode the imagery in the painting, because although Saville uses text within the painting to reinforces her theme, e.g. the words Tereus and Pandion, we get no clues from the heads themselves.  They are actually from a photograph of the heads of two notorious brothers, Abel and Auguste Pollet, guillotined in 1909 for crimes including robbery and murder (no mention was made of rape). The words “jug jug” make an additional literary reference, this time to T S Eliot who in turn directly referenced the myth of Philomela in his epic poem “The Waste Land” and evokes of the call of the nightingale.

The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king
So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
"Jug Jug" to dirty ears.

Eliot, T(homas) S(tearns). "The Waste Land" (Faber & Faber: London, 1972) lines 99–103

The final photographic source is the landscape, taken from a photograph of gaunt bare tree trunks in the devastated Chateau Wood, a portion of one of the battlegrounds in Ypres taken in 1917, which gives structural depth to the painting and provides a contemporary context.

Saville comments on the rarity of images in art to do with rape and how when talking about art “the issue of rape, the abduction of a woman’s body is never discussed”.  She acknowledges the difficulty of depicting rape in a painting and in this work uses a variety of sources to support her theme.  Perhaps best known for painting monumental close-ups of large nude women, Saville dispenses with any Rubenesque fleshy paint to savour, keeping the mood of the painting as grim as its subject.  The style adopted is a continuation of her relatively recent experimentation with pentimenti. These altered marks found in a traditional painting usually suggest that a correction of a pose was made in the under-drawing for the work.  Here they are clearly visible on the canvas and work in a totally different way depicting elapsed time as the artist strives to resolve the image and evoking the violent struggle in the tangled bodies on her canvas.  Although the face of the male perpetrator is hidden in melée of body parts, Saville has included as historical avatars the Pollet brothers, executed for their guilt 100 years earlier. This ensures the rape is not seen as a sexual impulse that has got out of control but as an aggressive and violent manifestation of sexuality. The introduction of the battlefield reminds us that rape was seen as an unpleasant but inevitable by-product of war that only recently was deemed a severe a breach of conventions.

La Peregrina is showing a part of the exhibition Rubens and his Legacy at the Royal Academy, London, WC2,

until April 10, 2015
(44-020-730- 8000; www.royalacademy.org.uk)

Jenny Saville

Reverse, 2002-3
Oil on canvas 213 x 244 cm

Royal Academy, London
18th June 2004

I saw this large self portrait, head on one side lying on a mirror at the Royal Academy Summer show in 2004. It was hung in a gallery of non-members work such that it could be seen from the central hall framed by the doorways; made the visit worthwhile.

It isn’t a traditional portrait by any means, more of an idea or sensation, perhaps akin to Francis Bacon but not as extreme. "Wants to be the subject/object as well as the artist/looker." The disconcerting gaze seems to be straight out at the viewer, challenging us as we satisfy our curiosity and look. Much larger than life, yet like many of her paintings, the subject almost seems too big for the frame and is cropped at the tip of the shoulder.

She finds working from life intimidating and she normally takes close up photographs of her model and uses these fragments stitched together to make her figure. However, she does use mirrors in the studio both to see her own flesh and to check a work from distance without having to stand back. Saville explains in a 2005 interview with Suzie Mackenzie from The Guardian that she doesn’t see the painting as a self-portrait; "I am not interested in portraits as such. I am not interested in the outward personality. I don't use the anatomy of my face because I like it, not at all. I use it because it brings out something from inside, a neurosis."[1]

She mixes the paint of various colours in large quantities in pots - up to 300 for a large painting. Starts with core tones and then shifts tones as required by adding purer colour. In Reverse there are lots of dark ochres in flesh and ground. A thin under painting gives way to thick layers of paint with lots of different marks. Some very dark (Degas) reds around the lips that make them vie with the eyes for attention. Brushwork with thicker paint looks very loose. Some marks are surprising going against shape of face.

Her work is often compared with Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud but it is the extensive vocabulary of William De Kooning, her “textbook” of marks and Velasquez, a painter’s painter, where the materiality of the paint literally adds another dimension that she cites as references[2]. Like Cezanne she acknowledges that "each mark should have its own perspective"[3].

I would say that the work expresses an internal melancholia and it is possible to read the image as if she is looking at her own reflection in the mirror. This raises the question of whether “the neurosis she is trying to bring out” is Narcissus seeing the shadow of despair in his own reflection. “Depression is the hidden face that is to bear him away into death, but of which he is unaware while he admires himself in a mirage.”[4]

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2005/oct/22/art.friezeartfair2005/print

[2] Schwabsky, Barry. “Jenny Saville: Unapologetic” Jenny Saville Macro, 2005. 103-105

[3] Scharma, Simon. “Interview with Jenny Saville” Saville Rizzoli International Publications Inc 2005. 124 - 127

[4] Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun Columbia University Press,1989. 5