Comparative analysis essay: Jenny Saville and Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo is a very influential female figure in the art world, made popular by her “frank expression of feminine themes” (Gunderman & Hawkins, 2008) and honest portrayal of twentieth century Mexican culture. She is perhaps best known for her iconic collection of over fifty-five self-portraits “which often portray her physical and psychological wounds” (Gunderman & Hawkins). Arguably her most powerful work is her 1932 painting, Henry Ford Hospital. Here, Kahlo situates herself on a hospital bed in the centre, surrounded by six floating objects connected to her by vein-like cords that, “for her, symbolize the bewildering emotions and sensations of her month-long ordeal of miscarriage” (Lowe, 1991:67). A comparison can be made between Kahlo’s representation of her short-lived experience of and longing for motherhood, and contemporary British artist Jenny Saville’s 2011 collection titled Continuum. In The Mothers, Saville, “newly energized by the experience of motherhood” (Cohen, 2011), similarly comments on the harsh reality of pregnancy and childbirth, painting herself as the main subject with the centre of her body merging grotesquely into those of her two children.
Fig. 1
Jenny Saville, The Mothers (2011), oil on canvas, 270 x 220 cm
Fig. 2
Frida Kahlo, Henry Ford Hospital (1932), oil on sheet metal, 30.5 x 35 cm
Both Saville and Kahlo are much inspired by their own personal experiences, as can be seen clearly through these two examples. Kahlo’s original aspirations were to become a physician, however her suffering following her accident when she was 18 instigated a passion for art. Nevertheless, this early interest in medicine still exists in her work. Similar to the way Saville uses photographs from surgery and medical textbooks as reference material, Kahlo alludes to science through her visual reference to the human anatomy, for example in Fig. 2, the object resembling the mid-section of a doctor’s model floating to her left and the depiction of her own damaged pelvis in the bottom right-hand corner. These objects are also allusions to the causes of her mental and physical pain, however; as the model showing “science’s idea of what is inside a woman” (Lowe, 1991:67), highlights her physical imperfections and abnormalities, and the pelvis represents the “inherent fragility of the human body” (Gunderman & Hawkins, 2008) and the fractured bones which made a successful pregnancy impossible to her. In addition to the injuries gained from her accident, Kahlo also experienced three miscarriages in her lifetime, along with an inconsistent relationship with muralist Diego Rivera, resulting in divorce and re-marriage. Therefore, it is unsurprising that pain and suffering were “a natural theme in her work” (Gunderman & Hawkins, 2008). In Fig. 2, pain can be identified by the stark red blood staining the white sheets beneath her and the single tear falling from her eye. There are also more subtle representations of her suffering, such as the snail, symbolizing the slow process of terminating her pregnancy, and the bruised orchid which can literally denote a wilting gift once given to her by Rivera, yet also has sexual connotations of wounded female genitalia. Similarly, Saville depicts pain in Fig. 1, however in this case through her use of colour, composition and body language. The face of the child in the foreground of the painting is contorted into an image of anguish and distress, with a hand that supposedly belongs to Saville clasped unsettlingly under his chin. She also portrays her own suffering by averting her gaze downwards, avoiding direct eye contact with the viewer, and her legs are opened and her abdomen swollen, perhaps to mimic the painful ordeal of childbirth. The confusing mess of line and shape around her also suggests her struggle to cope with this change in her lifestyle, becoming a mother. Saville has chosen to stick mainly to the red and pink shades of human skin, making the naked forms seem even more exposed and raw as she “[depicts] the realities of flesh” (Mullins, 2014:33), a concept that may be unsettling to the viewer. Where many famous nude studies are warn and erotic within their use of colour, Saville’s piece, on the other hand, has a slight blue tint to the colours which gives the impression of a coldness or isolation. This, coupled with the absence of a background or context to the composition suggests the artist’s feelings of solitude and separation during the transition into motherhood.
The two paintings may share the theme of maternity, though they differ greatly in style. Kahlo, despite denying it herself, is widely considered a surrealist artist due to the time period she began painting – the 1920’s, when the Surrealist movement was beginning to gain recognition and popularity – and the fantastical element and use of symbolism in her work. For example, in Henry Ford Hospital, she rejects reality by enlarging the objects so they are not to scale and suspending around the bed. However, while it may seem as though her paintings have a hallucinatory aspect, Kahlo stated: “I never painted my dreams…I painted my own reality.” Saville, on the other hand, uses varying tones and accurate proportions to make her forms life-like, however continues to distort them through chaotic brushstrokes and overlapping forms, producing a rather abstract result. In addition to this, Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 share the same medium, oil paint, although the way in which it has been applied produce very adverse effects. Saville works very freely and with an excess of paint that gives her work texture and an almost three-dimensional feel. She told Simon Schama in an interview that “I think about the identity of paint – how I could get this substance to read as, for example, sweaty flesh. I use oil a lot more now because it gives the paint movement” (2005:124). Movement is also created in Fig. 1 by the use of large visible brushstrokes and sketched outlines and suggestion of numerous forms layered of the top of the original self-portrait. Saville’s Continuum series was heavily influenced by Leonardo Da Vinci’s nativity sketches and The Virgin Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist. In an interview for a National Gallery online podcast, she admitted how she was fascinated as a child by the “revolving forms” and “endless movement” in his painting, the “internal structure which [she] didn’t understand”, and therefore imitated this overlapping technique in order to evoke a similar fascination and intrigue within her viewers. The impact of Saville’s painting is also greatly increased by the extreme size of the canvas she works on. The effect achieved by this is an almost uncomfortable, unavoidable force of her work upon the viewer, and also further confusion as the human eye struggles to fully assemble the mass of colour and movement into a coherent image. As Mullins states, her paintings “make us feel before we even fully grasp what we are looking at” (2014:33). Contrastingly, Kahlo works on a much smaller scale and in a more precise manner, including intricate details such as the windows on the factories in the far background, and the label “Henry Ford Hospital Detroit”) along the side of the bed. This encourages the viewer to look closer at the image in an attempt to gain all possible meaning. The colours used in Fig. 2 are dull, with many dark tones and various shades of brown, giving the painting an overall sense of depression, and the paint has been applied smoothly and flatly, mirroring the lack of depth in Kahlo’s life after losing her child. This is understandable when examined “in the context of Mexican social codes, where having a child…virtually defined womanhood” (Lowe, 1991:65) …she has not drawn herself to scale in Fig. 2, but much smaller, making her almost insignificant to the painting, mirroring how helpless and useless she felt in her role as a woman in society.
Kahlo's paintings were not simply critical comments on the social expectations of women, however. It seems that her art became a way of dealing with her mixed emotions and communicating them visually to other people, for example the fact that she is the only person featured, aside from her unborn foetus, highlights her feelings of isolation and loneliness during her miscarriage, with her hospital bed seeming to float in a vast expanse of nothingness. Even the nature of a self-portrait itself highlights this solitude, as Kahlo admitted “I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone…because I am the subject I know best.” Her paintings also helped to ease the pain she was going through, similar to the way photographer Jo Spence used her own body as the subject in Narratives of (Dis)ease in 1989 in an attempt to “reclaim the identity she felt was lost through the dehumanizing process” of cancer treatment (West, 2004:218). In Kahlo’s own words, “painting completed [her] life.” Comparatively, Saville’s study of reproduction and experiences of motherhood could be considered her personal expression of confusion, desperation and adjustment due to her bold choices of colour and wild brush strokes; although some critics see her work as a social stand against the way women have been portrayed in the past. Traditionally, a portrait of a mother and her children would denote love and care, perhaps depicting her engaging with stereotypical tasks such as cooking and caring for the family. However Saville is very controversial in her interpretation of this relationship, showing the imperfect reality of a struggling mother. Colls deduced that Saville was “producing re-presentations of the female nude that deliberately usurp the masculinist practices of painting the female nude” (2012).
Despite their differences in style and technique, it is evident from Figs. 1 and 2 that for both artists, the fundamental purpose of self-portraiture is this power to take or regain control of their own bodies, and also identity. Art has allowed women to “project particular ideas about themselves” (West, 2004:173), and their gender as a whole; as Saville said in an interview for The Independent in 1994: "...women have been so involved in being the subject-object, it’s quite important to take that on board and not just be the person looking and examining. You’re the artist but you’re also the model. I want it to be a constant exchange all the time.” (Schama, 2005:14).
Both Kahlo and Saville have made significant changes to the way female self-portraits are created and viewed. Kahlo, due to her transcendent approach to looking at life and society, and the admirable way she endured a lifetime of suffering, tackling both physical and cultural obstacles; and Saville, because of her original and shocking way of representing the twenty-first century female body. In Saville’s own words, she intends to be “a painter of modern life, and modern bodies”.
Bibliography
Illustrations
Kahlo, F., 1932. Henry Ford Hospital [oil on sheet metal] Tate [online]. (Accessed 27 November 2014) Available from: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/frida-kahlo/frida-kahlo-room-guide/frida-kahlo-room-guide-room-4
Saville, J., 2011. The Mothers [oil on canvas] Gagosian Gallery [online]. (Accessed 27 November 2014) Available from: http://www.gagosian.com/artists/jenny-saville
Books
Borzello, F. (1998) Seeing ourselves: women’s self-portraits. London: Thames & Hudson Ltd.
Durie, R. and Meskimmon, M. (1998) Face to face: directions in contemporary women’s portraiture. London: Scarlet Press.
Lowe, S. (1991) Frida Kahlo. New York: Universe Publishing.
Meskimmon, M. (1996) The art of reflection: women artists’ self-portraiture in the twentieth century. London: Scarlet Press.
Meskimmon, M. (2003) Women making art: history, subjectivity, aesthetics. London: Routeledge.
Mullins, C. (2014) Painting people: the state of the art. London: Thames & Hudson Ltd.
Petersen, K. and Wilson, J. (1976) Women artists: recognition and reappraisal from the early middle ages to the twentieth century. New York: HarperCollins.
Schama, S. (2005) Jenny Saville. New York: Rizzoli International Publications.
West, S. (2014) Portraiture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Journal Articles
Colles, R. (2012) BodiesTouchingBodies: Jenny Saville's over-life-sized paintings and the 'morpho-logics' of fat, female bodies. Gender, place and culture [online] 19(2), (Accessed 28 November 2014) 175-192. Available from: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0966369X.2011.573143#.VH8TGzGsWSo
Gunderman, R. and Hawkins, C. (2008) The self-portraits of Frida Kahlo. Radiology [online] 247(2), (Accessed 29 November 2014) 303-306. Available from: http://pubs.rsna.org/doi/full/10.1148/radiol.2472061459#_i3
Podcasts
Artist's Insight (2012) Painter Jenny Saville on the influence of Leonardo on her own work [podcast]. National Gallery. (Accessed 1 December 2014) Available from: http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/inspired-by-leonardo/
[edit: this link is no longer working, but the interview can be found here: http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/podcasts/the-national-gallery-podcast-episode-sixty-two]
Newspaper/Magazine Articles
Cohen, D. (2011) The Dutchmen’s heir: Jenny Saville at the Gagosian. Artcritical [online]. 6 October (Accessed 1 December 2014) Available from: http://www.artcritical.com/2011/10/06/jenny-saville/
Cooke, R. (2012) Jenny Saville: "I want to be a painter of modern life, and modern bodies". The Guardian [online]. 9 June (Accessed 3 December 2014) Available from: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/jun/09/jenny-saville-painter-modern-bodies