Lucian Freud and Jenny Saville: The Full Weight of the Body

Rumors concerning the death of painting have perpetually surfaced for half a century now. Yet the pluralism of postmodernism has left sufficient room for this more ancient form of art to remain. That being said, the role of the realist figurative painter seems to shrink a little more each year. In Britain, however, which has tended to champion some of the most innovative and non-traditional artists for the better part of two decades, there remains an unbroken line of figurative painters.

This is not an endless chain of teachers and pupils who pass down a strictly academic style of paint application, technique, and style; rather, there remains a continual fascination with the human form and its attendant psychological trappings. The subject of psychology and matters of the mind naturally brings us to the grandson of Sigmund Freud—Lucian Freud. Freud, the painter, has been hailed by many as the most important contemporary figurative painter for the past few decades.

Psychological states are certainly integral to Freud’s canvases, but physicality is really the dominant feature. The painter’s style, which began in a more surrealist vein, progressed to a maturity based on the physical qualities of the paint itself. By the 1980s the paint was not just a tool employed to present a facsimile of a human form on canvas. The encrustations of the medium and pigment on the canvas surface took on a substantial physicality of their own which bore the fullness of human presence.

The broad view of Freud’s work suggests an interest in humanity’s complexity and dignity. Again, as the work matured, the scenes depicted became less like staged theatrical productions—less like historical or mythological scenes of the past—and more like the focused gaze of an artist within his studio. Aside from strict portraits (most notably his 2001 portrait of Queen Elizabeth II), the bulk of Freud’s paintings are quite obviously models posed within the arena of the artist’s studio.

By stripping away the props and accoutrements of some fictional, staged scene—and often the model’s clothing—Freud directs our focus on the person or persons as he views them. These are typically friends and family members. The artist feels a need to know his models. The result is that his familiarity produces such a high level of vulnerability (on the model’s part) and scrutiny (on the artist’s part) that we are drawn past the magnificent surfaces into the hidden psychological aspects below. This forms a grafting of the physical with the psychological.

Freud’s work is often linked to the confident corporeality of his subjects. Rotund figures with excessive mounds of flesh have become a trademark. At times these figures seem little more than an exercise in the mastery of materials. The protuberances of paint are a stand-in for the folds of flesh, though a mere masterful bravado is seldom the end. The starkness of these immense figures within the limits of the studio space provides a glimpse beyond their sheer fleshiness and beyond that sole trait that we most often associate with an obese figure—the immensity of his or her physical body.

One of Freud’s most notoriously fleshy works—Benefits Supervisor Sleeping—sold at auction from Christie’s in New York in 2008 for $33.64 million.The estimated selling price would have made it the highest selling work by a living artist at that time. Yet all the publicity aside, this painting brings several signature elements of Freud’s work into alignment. The fleshiness and encrusted paint surface are coupled with the placement of the figure inside a studio setting, in a pose that heightens the sense of her physical weight with psychological heft. Still, the work is steeped in the tradition of the male gaze and the complicated heritage that that implies after the introduction of feminist theories.

Fellow Brit Jenny Saville approaches the figure with the sensibilities of a younger generation. She keeps one foot firmly planted in the figurative tradition that includes both Freud and Francis Bacon, but she is also ranked among the YBAs (Young British Artists) who rose to prominence in the mid-1990s. Her contemporaries are artists like Damien Hirst. Both artists were included in the infamous Sensation exhibition that induced cultural tremors when displayed at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999. Saville’s work may seem conservative in comparison to Hirst’s, but something more than a cursory glance reveals shared traits with the other YBAs.

Saville’s images are typically viewed through the lens of feminism, but that is too narrow a construction. The paintings that exhibit lines and shapes drawn onto the naked skin of fleshy females (Plan) imply the pre-surgical markings of a plastic surgeon. The artist actually observed plastic surgeries in the year after her art school studies. While there are connections to body image and the pressures placed on women in contemporary cultures—worldwide and not just in the West—the work is more expansive than that.

Saville’s figures do not merely exhibit a density of flesh, they often allude to severe physical traumas. The figures are wounded at times, yet the viewer is uncertain whether these are self-imposed traumas or the results of living in a tragic, broken world. Hybrid (1997) seems like a patchwork quilt of skin—a body mismatched to its ill-fitting parts. And this idea of not necessarily feeling at one with the body is a recurring theme in Saville’s work.

The displacement is most noticeable in the works of transvestites and transsexuals. There remains a uniquely female gaze, even in these works. To take these specific paintings on their own, divorced from Saville’s entire oeuvre, is to misread them. Saville is not simply concerned with issues of gender identity, nor even the finer points of feminism. Her work rings truer when linked to the universal theme of self identity.

Like Freud, Saville is exploring the linkage of body and soul. The physical weight sensed in a representational style and the inflictions enacted on Saville’s figures both allude to the woundings of the psyche and the immensity of existential crises in modern and contemporary human beings.

The adoption of the figure as the primary image in periods following the rise to prominence of abstraction and non-objectivity can be risky. It has sometimes been aligned with a non-progressive traditionalism that has been touted as irrelevant. The Greenbergian criticisms that still echo through contemporary art criticism favor elements of the chaotic and performative. And while analysis of art in these terms has trickled down to our larger culture in diluted forms like "reality television," it only subtly impacts the thinking of the average person. That is a primary reason why the figure has not disappeared in contemporary art. Its presence acts as a necessary ligament connecting the ordinary person to his or her place in the wider world.

In viewing the paintings of Freud and Saville we are each confronted with more than naked humanity. Ultra-physical bodies resonate with our own primal needs to uncover the complexity of being—physically and spiritually—and the implications that hold sway over our every day existence. This is why figurative work will never go out of fashion; our figure-to-figure relationship with artwork is a basic and necessary human experience.

“And why are those people naked…?”

There is one question that invariably arises when people view my artwork. “Just why are all the people naked?” Nude is the correct term, but that is not something to quibble over for the time being. There are several answers to the question and I will address each of them in turn, but I need to lay out a bit of my background before I do that.

The vocation of artist was not something that one would have foreseen in my future early on. I grew up in a small village—not even large enough to be designated a town—in Michigan. It is quite rural and many of my friends and classmates actually lived on farms. A large percentage of my family were and are teachers. And while most in my family are musically inclined, any artistic leanings never led toward any formal training or professions within the creative sector.

Academically, I was a fairly exceptional student which provided many options for a career path. It was not until I entered high school that it became obvious to me that what I truly enjoyed most was creating artwork. At that time, like many artistically talented kids, my main goal was producing realistic drawings and paintings, often of animals and wildlife. What can I say? I grew up pretty close to the earth and my family and friends certainly appreciated that style. Much to my dismay, several of those old paintings still adorn the homes of my family members.

Once I began my formal art education in college the trajectory of my work soon took shape. I had an equal interest in art history and was drawn to figurative painters, in particular. I honestly didn’t start out planning to produce mostly nude figures, but in order to understand the human body, even clothed, one needs to know its structure without clothing. When I began to produce work with nude figures, even from the first, it made me somewhat of a maverick. Since I come from a very conservative evangelical/fundamentalist protestant background, and the undergraduate institutions I attended share a similar heritage, the work wasn’t deemed as the most appropriate. It continued to cause problems in those settings as time went on.

Fast forwarding to the work of the past decade, I am able to explain the use of the nude in more depth. On the most basic level I am following in the long tradition of figurative artists going back to the Greeks. Modern and contemporary artists who have had a profound impact on me are Leonard Baskin, Lucian Freud, Kathe Kollwitz, and Odd Nerdrum. Surveying the work of these artists one can easily see that I am often drawn to more psychological and sublime portrayals of the human form. The figure is an equal element with color, value, shape, and line inside the composition.

The next, more generalized reason for employing the nude figure, is connected to my use of text along with imagery in my work. I am exploring an incarnational view in which the person of Jesus is at once the Word of God, but also the physical manifestation of God on earth. The Word and Image of God, equally. As my friend Ed Knippers often states, if Jesus truly came in full, physical, human form, as a Jewish man, then he came anatomically correct. This doesn’t mean that I am glorifying his sexuality, but neglecting or subverting it is equally dangerous. It amounts to a modern day Gnosticism. This is actually one of the most shocking premises of Christianity and it continues to be a difficult element of the faith.

Conservative American Christianity is often more than uncomfortable with the body and sexuality. Again, this leads to a renewed Gnosticism. While there is plenty of pronouncement against adultery, fornication, and homosexuality, there has been far too little time given to discussing human sexuality in the most basic sense. The fear that talking about sexuality openly and frankly, because it might be an encouragement to young people to experiment sexually, has led to neglecting to talk about it much at all. That lack of discussion has probably, inadvertently, led to more than one teenage pregnancy. What I am getting at by using these nude figures is confronting this basic fact of human sexuality as part of the fullness of our humanity.

I would add that this is not relegated solely to conservative forms of American Christianity but is symptomatic of American culture in general. The Puritan roots of American culture have somehow led to us overly sexualizing the physical body so that any hints of the body in our culture connect it to sexual themes or concepts. So, even the average America, Christian or not, is apt to find nudity in art as vaguely or explicitly erotic or perverse.

The final, specific use of the nude in my work is related to the nude figures portrayed in the altarpieces. In this instance the nudity is used as a leveling agent. Again, my protestant background comes into play here. These “personal saints” are every day, common people, not necessarily those canonized by the Holy Roman Church. I have chosen to portray them as saints, venerating them for living exemplary lives in one way or another. They are ordinary people placed on a pedestal for others to consider. Saints are living all around us. As I elevate them I also bring them back down to the level of each of us. They are equally as human as you and me.

I know that producing work with nude figures is ensuring that some people will find it not to be child-friendly, or even cause them to label it as obscene. It also limits those who will be willing to purchase it. That is the risk that I take. I find that being true to what the work is calling me to do is ultimately more important. If the work is not honest in that sense it will eventually be evident to the viewer.