The Anatomy of Painting: Jenny Saville's 'stunning' retrospective

"I believe that Jenny Saville is a genius," said Cal Revely-Calder in The Daily Telegraph; and of the 45 works in this "stunning" retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery, there are "at least a dozen" paintings that confirm my view.

Born in Cambridge in 1970, Saville studied at the Glasgow School of Art and caught the eye of collector Charles Saatchi at her graduation show; he "bought her entire collection on the spot". Since then, she has proved herself as one of our greatest figurative painters, renowned for her confrontational and densely textured depictions of nude figures, and for the virtuosic way in which she conjures the texture of flesh in her canvases.

Bringing together a selection of work that spans her entire career, this retrospective is a testament to her brilliance. It demonstrates how through colour, form and masterful manipulation of paint alone, Saville "brings her subjects to glowing, shifting life. This is portrait painting as electricity."

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Saville is "the natural heir to the great British figurative tradition of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach", said Mark Hudson in The Independent. It's clear from her earliest works here that she had the technical skill "to become a highly successful conventional figurative painter". But during the 1990s, the era of the Young British Artists, such painting was unfashionable in the extreme. So she complicated her portrait painting by fragmenting and distorting her figures, and blowing them up to "massive scale".

It won her "immediate acclaim" – and you can see why. "Propped" (1992) sees the artist sitting on a sculptor's modelling stand, "as though her exuberantly plastic flesh is about to be manipulated into a work of art". We see her from a low angle, so that her hands and knees seem to "bulge" from the confines of the painting. The 9ft-tall self-portrait "Plan" (1993), meanwhile, gives us a "towering female torso" over which Saville has drawn contour lines, as if the artist herself were a landscape.

These early pictures are bona fide "masterpieces", said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. There are a good three dozen of them here, and they are the show's highlights. Thereafter, things get "problematic".

Saville's early 2000s paintings see her producing "billboard-sized" heads. Alas, that's what they look like: "billboards – adverts for a zombie movie". Her next stylistic change sees her painting naked men and women writhing in bed: she's emulating the Old Masters, of course, but the effect is off-puttingly pornographic. Latterly, her work has concentrated on "giant human heads", jumbled into "constituent eyes, noses and mouths".

She is a wonderful painter of all of these things, but still they don't quite work. It's thus impossible to escape the feeling that Saville has never really equalled the "splash" with which she arrived as a painter. But none of these reservations stop this "being a must-see event".