Benefits Supervisor Sleeping

The picture has almost nothing to subtract. Take away the sofa and the body loses what bears it: the sag of the cushions, the arm the head rests on, the worn pattern against which skin is read as skin. Take away the floor and the sofa floats; that strip places the scene in a room where work is done. Take away the title and the picture loses its one sentence about the world outside the studio. Every part of the body is load: the weight falling to one side, the folds where flesh meets flesh, the hand, the sleeping face. What is permitted rather than compelled is extent: the upholstery at the edges carries less than it is given, and a margin at either end could go. The life size is compelled. Held below the top because the parts are few, and their necessity is a single motif’s, not a structure’s.

Score: 8.1 / 10

What the canvas brings into the open is a meaning, not a mood. The body is not an ideal or a type but a weight a particular person carries, and in sleep lays down, shown without flattery, without contempt and without desire, as it happens to be. The nude, the oldest genre of the beautiful body, is turned onto a body the genre had kept out, and that body is given the attention the genre gave its goddesses. The title adds a second disclosure: this is a working woman of the welfare state, and the most private state of the body is set beside the most public of jobs. Held below 8 because much of this is the painter’s programme across forty years rather than this canvas’s discovery, the social meaning lives in the title more than in the paint, and whose sleep is being looked at stays unsettled.

Score: 7.9 / 10

There is elevation, and it is of one kind: grandeur of mass. At full size the body is a landscape, its folds and slopes laid across the sofa like ground, and the response is closer to awe at sheer presence than to beauty. Sleep adds a stillness the waking nudes lack: the figure is wholly absorbed and the viewer wholly excluded, and in that exclusion there is gravity. The heights recur only as passages of flesh, the light across a flank, the shadowed undersides, worked in densities of colour that move from pink toward grey and green. There is no transport, no terror and no lift; the picture is all weight and no flight. Held at this figure because the height is one effect, sustained rather than recurring, and for many viewers it stays at fascination.

Score: 7.4 / 10

The archetypes are summoned plainly: the sleeping Venus of Giorgione and Titian, the reclining nude from Rubens to Courbet, and further back the great mother of the paleolithic figurines, the body as earth. One of them is built rather than evoked. The sleeping Venus is a structure in which the goddess is unaware and the viewer looks freely; here that structure is kept exactly and its subject replaced, so that the inherited pattern carries a modern particular, a named office worker on a studio sofa, and the pattern itself is put in question. The particular stays particular: this sofa, this woman, this job. But the mother and the earth are brought by viewers more than built by the canvas, and the work’s relation to myth is mostly a relation to the history of painting.

Score: 7.5 / 10

The inheritance: the reclining nude of the European tradition; Courbet’s insistence on the body as matter; the figurative painting of the School of London, held against abstraction and then against conceptual art; and the painter’s own turn, from the 1960s, from fine sable to hog-hair brushes and loaded paint. The departure here is the choice of body and the scale at which it is held: a very large woman, at life size, asleep, with no ennobling and no satire. The stake was real in the 1990s, when the London art world’s attention was on the installation and the shock object, and a monumental painted nude looked out of its time. But the turn had been made before this canvas, in the Bowery nudes of 1990 to 1992 and decades of studio nudes, and this is the fullest statement of a proven path more than a new wager.

Score: 7.5 / 10

Change the form and much of what the work knows goes. Its knowledge is that a body is substance, and it knows it because the paint is substance: flesh built in thick, worked layers of white and earth colours, so that the surface has weight where the body has weight. A photograph of the same woman on the same sofa would show the body and lose the time of its looking, the months of sittings the accumulated paint records, and the equality of attention by which skin and worn fabric are painted with one patience. The life size makes the viewer stand before a person, not a picture of one, and the horizontal format is the body’s own. Held below the top because much of the knowledge is carried by the image in reproduction, as its fame shows, and the same form serves the painter’s other pictures of the sitter nearly as well.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Evidence over promise: thirty-one years, and the axis is partly forecast. The questions it has sustained are real. Is the look tender or cruel? Does the canvas dignify a body the culture scorns, or display it? What does the title do: make a joke of a civil servant asleep, or set class and work beside the nude? How far is the subject the woman and how far the paint? These have been argued since the picture was shown, and since 2008 the debate on its price has joined them. The surface itself yields on return, in the colour of the flesh and the passage from skin to fabric. Held below 8 because so much of the return is to questions of gaze and price rather than to depths the image keeps unfolding, and because the span is short.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The field is British and European painting of the 1990s, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the culmination of the painter’s late nude, the most complete statement that the painted figure could still bear the full weight of attention in the decade that had turned from it. It reorganises no possibility of painting; its means had been established over thirty years. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: very wide as an image and an emblem, the picture by which the painter’s late work is known and, after the sale of 2008, the token of figurative painting’s standing in the market. As redirection, less: the large painted bodies of the next British generation, Jenny Saville’s above all, had begun before 1995 and owe the painter’s work as a whole more than this canvas, and much of the reach is price, which is presence, not pressure.

Score: 7.4 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at thirty-one years. Form: whole. The image is the one painted, and nothing that carries its meaning is lost or replaced. Presence: the image is among the most reproduced paintings of its decade, but the canvas has been in private hands since its sale in 2008; fame and price are presence, not proof, and the private keeping is a small charge. Fabric: thickly built oil on canvas, with no known condition problem. The usual figure for a span of three decades with form whole stands a little above this one; the canvas is held a tenth below it for the private keeping. The surface carries little fixed to its moment beyond the office named in the title.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Judged as command of oil on canvas at life size, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing: the claim of the picture is carried by the handling. The flesh is built in loaded, directional strokes that follow the form, the colour moving from warm pinks to cool greys and greens in the shadows, so that skin reads as living and heavy at once. The drawing of weight is exact: where flesh folds, where it presses on the cushion, how the arm lies on the sofa’s arm. The upholstery is painted in a flatter, more descriptive touch that sets off the body’s density. The costs are charged: passages where the build-up reads as labour more than as form, a certain sameness of touch across the large expanses of the body, and a background treated as fact rather than as space. High command, not the summit’s.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the sleeping face, the one place of a person’s inwardness, and the worn upholstery of the sofa, the most inert thing in the picture. They obey one law: everything in the room is examined with the same unsparing attention and given the same standing as matter under light. Skin, fabric, floor and hair are all surfaces with a history of wear, and none is idealised or caricatured. The law reaches the title, which names the sitter by her work with the flat exactness the paint gives her body. Nothing in the canvas contradicts it. Held below the top because narrowness is not coherence: one body, one sofa, one register of scrutiny, and the law, once grasped, governs a small territory completely.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The orders held: the body, at its fullest weight; consciousness, in its absence, since sleep is the one state in which the sitter is not performing; labour and the state, by the title alone, a benefits office of the welfare state; class, in the worn furniture and the job; and art, in the studio and in the genre the canvas both joins and questions. The single body integrates them, but labour and the state are held only in words. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: family, history, the natural order, the sacred, any world outside the studio. A single figure on a single sofa cannot encompass much. The figure describes the form.

Score: 6.4 / 10