Jenny Saville at Modern Art Oxford and the Ashmolean Museum

‘Cultural’ summers in Oxford tend to be narrated by group leaders, reliving the town’s history for summer schools and tourists, and are punctuated by Shakespeare plays on the college lawns.  So the unequivocal dynamism of the current display of British artist Jenny Saville’s works both at Modern Art Oxford and at the Ashmolean Museum (on until 16 September 2012) has therefore been particularly welcome.

Saville paints a lot of flesh and the flagrant frontality with which she does so is perhaps one of the reasons she is often compared with Lucian Freud. If you saw the National Portrait Gallery’s recent exhibtion of Lucian Freud Portrait’s you will remember the triptych of paintings of the ‘Benefits Supervisor’.

Lucian Freud, 'Benefits Supervisor Sleeping'

These kind of contours find their echo in Saville’s paintings.

The tone of Saville’s latest series of drawings, the ‘Reproduction’ series, strike a different chord. It is the palimpsests of images and themes from art history’s older players which call out from these. Forms from Picassos and Manets wink out from the wonderfully loose and exploratory drawings in the first room of Modern Art Oxford’s exhibition and the explicit referencing in Saville’s two drawings in the Ashmolean testify to her transcendent draughtsmanship.

Those in the renaissance room of the Ashmolean hang gracefully alongside the museum’s relatively new acquisition of Titian’s ‘Triumph of Love’ and the paintings of other Venetian legends. Notably, there is no jarring with such lofty neighbours. That period’s great exploration of the theme of the Madonna and Child is taken up in these incredible drawings and Saville draws on her own experience of motherhood. Saville’s expressive lines act as loose harnesses for her wriggling babes; the seeming reality of their dynamic with the formidable women from whose embrace they writhe, enables the theme of motherhood more generally to carry us through time, to the present day. It is quite a feat and the effect is, to repeat an aptly used word, monumental.

In his laudatory review of these exhibitions, Waldemar Januszczak berates the loss of Saville’s work to a selective, moneyed audience in the recent past and her consequent 'public' absence makes her ironically conspicuous amongst the crowd of her more media-happy YBA peers. These two exhibitions in Oxford are free and are inspiring viewing, go and see them!

It is really worth listening to Saville’s video interview in Modern Art Oxford too. She has a wonderful way with words and very easy voice. 

 

Modern Art Oxford has a little café which rolls on to the street which might be worth popping into after. 

Francis Bacon's Studio

The parallels between museums and places of worship have often been drawn and the deference with which art is treated can be remarkable (of course, this goes some way to explain its tumultuous history).

In any case, the clear resonance of such comparatives cut through the hushed silence of the ritual-makers when I visited the exhibition of Francis Bacon’s studio at Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin recently.

In 1998 the entirety of Francis Bacon’s chaotic studio was immaculately relocated from London to Dublin. So if you potter past the pastelled, sea-whisked impressionist studies and side rooms of Constable ‘sketches’, into the last rooms of the Hugh Lange gallery, this is what awaits you:

A real mess.

Archaeologists, conservators and curators noted down the location of dust particles, paintbrushes, photos and well-leaved books in the studio – some 7,000 items – and tagged and labelled away in order to re-create the exact clutter around which the artist breathed, moved and painted.

In the first room of the exhibition there is an amusing video interview of Bacon from a South Bank show in 1985 playing on a huge screen which you can see from t.13.50 here: http://www.ubu.com/film/bacon.html.  

In the video, Bacon implies that his mess was fundamental to his creative process. Primed with this insight, the suggestion that the configuration for inspiration lies ahead, the visitor makes the full circuit around the walls that encase the room, we peer through the selective glass panels, intrigued. And the thought cannot escape you: his studio is being visited like a religious shrine and its contents have been preserved and are now treated like religious relics.