Propped

The test is put to four things: the body, the stool, the viewpoint and the text. The body cannot go. Nor can the low viewpoint, which makes the flesh a mass bearing down on the viewer, nor the stool, the small, hard, absurd support the title names: the figure is propped, held up by a thing too small for her, and holding herself up with her own hands. The text is where the test bites. It names, in borrowed theory, what the paint already does; remove it and the canvas loses its second register, the mirror and the act of reading, but keeps its argument. That the text is reversed, made a thing to see and not a caption, partly answers the charge. The cap clears comfortably, short of works where nothing is spare.

Score: 7.9 / 10

What the painting brings into the open can be stated. A woman’s body is seen by her from inside an inherited gaze: she grips and pushes her own flesh as if checking it against a standard, and looks down from the height the low viewpoint gives her, so that the viewer is made small and placed where the judging eye is. The disclosure is that the self-image of the body is a site of pressure, self-handled, not merely looked at. That is a meaning, not a mood, and the paint shows it before the text names it. What holds the axis below the gate is the help the canvas takes from its inscription, theory stating part of what the image should carry alone, and that the condition shown is one, intensely, rather than a world.

Score: 8.1 / 10

The elevation is of the dreadful and the overwhelming, not of the beautiful. Before a body more than two metres high, seen from beneath, the viewer receives a real shock of scale: the knees come forward like architecture, the flesh has the weight of geology, and the small head looks down from far off. That is a genuine physical grandeur, and it is the painting’s whole register. It does not vary or recur in other keys. There is one summit, held across the canvas, and much of it is the shock of first sight, the height that wears most on return; the scored text cools the surface rather than raising it. It stands above Hirst’s skull and Gursky’s river, which rise more by idea than by matter, and below works that rise repeatedly.

Score: 7.6 / 10

Evoked more than built. The figure summons the oldest image of the female body, the stone Venus of the Palaeolithic, broad and heavy, and the low view makes her a monument. It summons the reclining Venus of the painters by refusing her ease, setting her upright on a stool and against the viewer. The reversed text summons Narcissus and the mirror, and here one structure is built rather than alluded to: the canvas is made to be completed in a mirror, so that reading it repeats the act it shows, a woman seeing herself through a surface. That is load-bearing, and small. The goddess and the monument stay a summons. The particular body never becomes the figure it calls up, and does not wish to.

Score: 7.4 / 10

The inheritance is the painted nude of flesh: Rubens, Rembrandt’s late women, Stanley Spencer’s self-portraits with Patricia and, nearest, Lucian Freud’s naked portraits and de Kooning’s Women. The turn is real. The flesh is painted by a woman from her own body, at a monumental scale given before then mostly to male painters’ looking, from a viewpoint that puts the subject above the viewer, with theory carved into the surface. The stake was real too: a student in 1992, when the art of her generation in Britain was turning to the object and the installation, staked her degree on a single large figurative oil. Held below the gate because the departure is in viewpoint and authorship more than in means, which come from Freud and the heroic nude.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Would a different form change what the painting knows? Largely. The scale is the knowledge: at life size or below the body would be looked at; above life size and seen from beneath, it looks down, and the viewer’s judging gaze is made physically small. Paint laid thick and worked with the hand in the flesh makes the flesh a material as heavy as what it shows; a photograph at this size would show the same body and lose that equivalence. The text, scored into the wet paint, must be in the paint and must be backwards. Held below the top because the inscription could be another passage, or none, and the canvas would know nearly as much, and because the stool and the ground are carried with less necessity than the body.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Evidence over promise: thirty-four years, in which the canvas has stood as a fixed case in the writing on the nude of the 1990s, on the female body in painting and on the Saatchi generation, and has been returned to at each stage of the painter’s career and again at its sale. The questions it raises stay open: whether the low view is an empowerment or a punishment; whether the figure looks at us, at herself or at the standard she presses against; whether the text completes the image or confesses a doubt of it. Yet the return has often been to the occasion, the degree show, the patron, the price, more than to the surface, and its single overwhelming effect is a thing first sight takes nearly entire. The figure is what its age can evidence.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The field is painting in Britain at the start of the 1990s. The intrinsic force is considerable for that field: with its companions the canvas declared that the large figurative oil, and the nude, could be the art of a young painter at the moment of the readymade and the vitrine, and that the nude could be taken over by a woman from inside. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is real in the career and in the market and narrower in named redirection. It made the painter’s name, entered Sensation, and is cited as an emblem of the return of flesh painting in the 1990s; but no particular later works can be named that it redirected, and the broader turn of women painting the female body has many sources. Fame and price are presence, not reach.

Score: 7.5 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at thirty-four years. Form: whole. One canvas, nothing known to be lost or replaced, the image legible as made. Presence: wide for its age, through Sensation, the career and the widely reported sale of 2018; but the canvas is privately held and not continuously on public view, and presence earns at most a tenth. Fabric: a thick oil on canvas of three decades, with no reported damage, and no charge. Interpolated for its age between the rows for twenty-five and thirty-five years, the figure falls at 8.5 to 8.6, and is set at the foot because the presence, though wide, is the presence of fame more than of public access. A survival of three decades does not outscore one of centuries.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Judged as command of oil in the flesh, at a scale that punishes uncertainty. The planes of thigh and belly are built in broad, loaded strokes that turn without losing the mass. The colour is pushed toward the greys, mauves and yellows of bruised and pressed skin. The fingers’ pressure is shown as displaced flesh rather than as line. The foreshortening from below is held across two metres without the figure breaking apart. The making is load-bearing: the weight is made by the handling, and youth earns nothing here, since the figure is the handling as it stands. Held below the top because the head and the far parts of the figure are slighter than the near masses, the ground and the stool are summary, and the making has the stridency of a single attack.

Score: 8.3 / 10

One law governs: pressure. Take the two most distant elements, the impasto of the knees in the foreground and the small, thinly carried head with the scratched text near the surface. Both obey it: the flesh pressed by the hands, the viewer pressed by the scale, the woman pressed by words she must read backwards. Theory and paint, the cerebral and the carnal, stand within the same physics, an achievement given how far apart they are in kind. Yet the range is narrow, one figure, one register, one effect, and narrowness is not coherence. Where the coherence is tested at its widest, the text against the flesh, it holds; but it holds by addition rather than by fusion, and the figure stands for a law held over a small territory.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The orders held: the body and the consciousness that inhabits it; the gaze of others as a social pressure, a standard of how a woman should look; the history of the nude, held as the tradition the canvas answers; and the order of theory and language, scored into the surface. These are integrated in one image rather than listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: labour, the family, the state, the natural world, and the sacred except as the summoned shadow of the Venus. A single figure on a stool is a small form, and the figure describes the form. It holds more orders than Hirst’s skull or Gursky’s river, which hold one or two, and far fewer than works that hold a household, a court or a city.

Score: 6.6 / 10