Sunday Shortlist, from The Week
'Stunning' portraits and a 'witty' polemic

 
EXHIBITION REVIEW

Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting

The British artist's 'masterpieces' are on display at the National Portrait Gallery

"I believe that Jenny Saville is a genius," said Cal Revely-Calder in The 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."

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".

National Portrait Gallery, London WC2. Until 7 September

 
 
TV REVIEW

Grenfell: Uncovered 

A searing account of an avoidable tragedy

Eight years have passed since Grenfell Tower went up in flames, killing 72 people, said Vicky Jessop in London's The Standard. The public inquiry laid out the litany of failings that led to this appalling disaster; now, Netflix has summed them all up in this searing documentary. The sheer variety of ways in which the residents were failed beggars belief, from the construction company Rydon's decision to save £5,000 by using cladding that its manufacturer, Arconic, knew to be flammable, to the failure to enforce safety standards because of David Cameron's war on regulation, and the London Fire Brigade's lack of preparation. To tell the story, Olaide Sadiq brings together an array of witnesses, including activists, survivors and firefighters, whose grief "bleeds off the screen".

Directed with "forensic" skill, this is a compassionate and righteously angry documentary, said Phil de Semlyen in Time Out: "If it doesn't leave you furious, you're not paying attention." Sadiq chronicles the events of the night via news footage, amateur videos and audio from the emergency services, to haunting effect. In the aftermath, ex-housing minister Eric Pickles comes across as particularly odious – misremembering the death toll and telling the public inquiry not to waste his time. What sets "Grenfell: Uncovered" apart, said Nick Hilton in The Independent, is that it doesn't simply offer another "affecting tribute", it is a film that "wants to play the blame game. Much of what went wrong at Grenfell, it concludes, was a failure to learn the lessons of the past."

 
 
ALBUM review

Loyle Carner: Hopefully!

Since his debut in 2017, Loyle Carner's mix of "soft beats and emotional lyricism" has marked him out as a singular voice on the hip-hop scene, said Ollie Macnaughton in The Telegraph. The Londoner's excellent new album, his fourth, combines "jazzy, R'n'B riffs with a level of mellow self-reflection in his writing" – much of it about his anxieties and feelings about fatherhood – which makes him "one of British music's most unique and poetic voices".

It's a strong collection, rooted in a "masterful balance of melancholy and perseverance", said Liberty Dunworth in NME. The 11 tracks are introspective, but have a "more optimistic outlook than usual and see the songwriter start to embrace other genres". There are "uplifting indie inflections" on tracks such as "In My Mind" and "All I Need". Others, such as the moving "Strangers", find Carner singing instead of rapping – to evocative effect. This is his most mature and refined music yet: his "lyrics and instrumentals may be more intricate than before, but they come together more coherently than ever".

 
 
BOOK OF THE WEEK

The Genius Myth

by Helen Lewis 

Steve Jobs used to wash his feet in the toilet, would park his car in disabled bays, and if he didn't like something, he'd shout "This is shit!" at his minions. But the "turtleneck-wearing" Apple founder also oversaw the creation of the Mac and the iPhone, and helped launch Pixar Studios, said Stuart Jeffries in Literary Review. He was very much one of the type defined by Helen Lewis in her entertaining new book as the "genius asshole".

"The Genius Myth" takes a sceptical look at a concept that has long been used to explain exceptional achievement. Lewis doesn't deny that certain individuals have "created world-changing work", said Lucasta Miller in the Financial Times. Her goal is not to debunk Shakespeare or Picasso. Her "beef" is with the mythology surrounding genius, and the assumptions it gives rise to: that certain people (invariably men) are "innately better than others"; and that they got where they did through their own towering brilliance, without being significantly helped by others. Written in a "fresh and unpretentious" style, this is a "witty and timely critique of a perennially problematic concept".

This "lively book is stuffed with anecdotes" about "clever men behaving badly and then claiming their 'genius' as an alibi", said Kathryn Hughes in The Sunday Times. Einstein drew up a contract for his first wife, Mileva Maric, demanding she bring him three meals a day and "stop talking to me if I request it". Jackson Pollock would have been a "non-functioning alcoholic" had his wife, Lee Krasner, not sacrificed her own artistic impulses to care for him; even so, he treated her abysmally. Lewis argues that, like the Greeks and Romans, we'd be better off ascribing genius to individual works rather than their creators, said Mark Nayler in the Times Literary Supplement. "'War and Peace' is an act of genius," she writes. "Leo Tolstoy was a demanding aristocrat who went very peculiar indeed."

It's perfectly sensible to demand that we stop putting people "on pedestals" just because they happen to be talented, said Houman Barekat in The Guardian. But there's a sense that in advancing this argument, Lewis is behind the curve. Thanks to the slew of recent articles and books exposing the awful behaviour of lauded artists, belief in innate genius is "probably less pronounced today than at any point since the 1960s".

Yet the concept of the lone genius hasn't lost its appeal, said Peter Conrad in The Observer: just look at the veneration Elon Musk inspires. Lewis' "angry, witty book" is a valuable critique of the "flattering fiction" of genius, and the concept's "myth-making boosters".

 
 
OBITUARY

Kim Woodburn 

TV presenter known as the Queen of Clean

Kim Woodburn (pictured right), who has died aged 83, was 60 years old and working as a live-in housekeeper for an Arab sheikh in Kent when her agency suggested that she audition for a new reality TV show. "How long have you been cleaning?" she was asked by the producers. "Too bloody long!" she replied. "I've worked for some dirty beggars in my time." Delighted by her glitzy personal style and caustic manner, they paired her with Aggie MacKenzie, a journalist who worked for Good Housekeeping, to front "How Clean is Your House?". "So began a chapter in my life that I'd have dismissed as fanciful if it had been predicted by a fortune-teller," Woodburn wrote.

Clad in white overalls and rubber gloves, the pair would stride into people's homes, allow the viewing public to gawk at the state they were in – kitchen walls dripping with fat; dead mice down the backs of sofas; years of clutter clogging up living rooms – before getting to work. Woodburn, an imposing woman who wore her nails long and her platinum hair scraped back in a bun, would join the team cleaning the house, while berating its occupiers for their slovenly ways. MacKenzie took swabs from sticky counters to send to labs for analysis.

The pair were dubbed the Queens of Clean, and the show proved a massive hit. But behind the scenes, they were not getting on. MacKenzie accused Woodburn of having shoved her, physically, during a row when they were appearing together in panto. Woodburn's temper also blew on "Celebrity Big Brother", when she feuded with her fellow contestants, including Coleen Nolan – a row she then continued on "Loose Women". After Woodburn's death, however, MacKenzie described her former colleague as a "tormented soul", who had "deep pain and incredible strength" – a reference to the abuse she had suffered in her childhood.

She was born Patricia McKenzie in Portsmouth in 1942. Her father, a former Royal Marine, left the family soon afterwards. Woodburn described her mother as an "evil and vicious" alcoholic who starved her of affection and regularly beat her. At 15, she ran away to live with her father – only for him to start sexually abusing her. She escaped by becoming a live-in cleaner in Berkhamsted, before moving to Liverpool. Aged 23, she fell pregnant. Her boyfriend vanished, and at 20 weeks she gave birth at home alone to a stillborn son. Determined to start afresh, she changed her name to Kim – after the Hollywood star Kim Novak. Her first marriage ended in divorce in 1975; she is survived by her second husband, Peter Woodburn, a former police officer. Her TV success brought her a level of wealth she had never dreamed of, said The Times; but she carried on doing her own cleaning.