“Tracey Emin: I Loved You Until the Morning”
Yale Center for British Art
Through Aug. 10.
The visceral style conveys everything, in all its contradictions and complexities. The figure is a woman on all fours, hair bedraggled, back arched. She’s in a position of extremity, but which extremity? It could be an excoriating portrait of the subjugation of women, or a portrait of exhaustion. It could also be a depiction of a woman in the throes of intense sexual pleasure. Which is it?
The title — You kept it coming — doesn’t help clear up the ambiguity. What does the “it” in the title really refer to?
It’s been said many times, cheekily and with some variation, that all art is either about sex or death, and the best art is about both. The work of celebrated British artist Tracey Emin — now getting her first solo show in North America, “Tracey Emin: I Loved You Until the Morning,” at the recently reopened Yale Center for British Art through Aug. 10 — scores high on both counts, stirring them together so potently that it’s hard to look away.
In the art world, Tracey Emin is a big deal, well established and internationally recognized. As an accompanying brochure states, “for more than 30 years, Tracey Emin, one of Britain’s leading contemporary artists, has made expressive and candid works that explore love, loss, desire, and grief.” She has worked in multiple media throughout her career, but “she began her artistic journey as a painter. When she was selected to represent Britain at the 2007 Venice Biennale, she decided to make a public return to painting. This exhibition is the first to trace the evolution of her paintings over the subsequent two decades, setting them alongside selected drawings and sculptures.”
“Unflinchingly honest and with a frankness that can be unsettling,” the brochure continues, “Emin uses the materiality of paint to convey emotional states that veer from the most life-affirming to the most harrowing aspects of being a woman. The multiple emotional registers of her works leave their meanings open-ended: the use of red evokes love, passion, and desire, as well as pain, trauma, and injury. The female figure unites her works across media and decades and becomes a channel for personal experiences that are at once timely and universal.”
The art world can be notoriously detached from the tastes of people outside it, and a trip to a contemporary art museum can sometimes be in exercise in appreciating how a high-profile artist just might be pulling one over on critics, curators, collectors, and audiences alike. Emin’s paintings aren’t like that; they speak for themselves in ways the works of few contemporary artists do. It begins with their size. They’re much bigger than they appear in the photographs in this article, and in person, the effect is powerful. Images that unsettle on a small scale become confrontational, overwhelming, shocking, engrossing. They explode with chaotic energy. In part, they communicate quite directly how the paintings are made in the first place.
“I’ve found a way to paint for myself, which is expressionist, it’s emotional, it’s heartfelt. There’s nothing cynical about my paintings,” Emin says in an accompanying video (above). “All the things that we live through, through life, all the things that we go through and experience, I put into my painting — love, death … sickness, health, sadness, sex.… I never know what I’m going to paint until the painting’s finished. It’s like a psychological journey. It’s like going to see a fortune teller or a soothsayer because the painting often tells me something that I didn’t know, or didn’t want to know.”
The more Emin talks in the video, the more she reveals herself as someone fully in touch with deeply held feelings of intense joy and pain. She shows, too, a sense of acceptance of turmoil and friction. All that is in her canvases, too. There is no one way to make art, but “I Loved You Until the Morning” is a strong case for a kind of artmaking that is equal parts inquisitive and unflinching, art that asks questions more than it offers answers, art in which the artist creates from a position of real vulnerability, taking risks, putting herself on the line.
In Emin’s case the results are staggering. Her art is very much about being a woman, so there are some aspects of it that men (such as this reporter) can reach only through empathy rather than lived understanding. But the doors are flung wide open to allow for that empathy to happen, and in that sense, everyone is invited in. In Emin’s willingness to bare it all, emotionally speaking, she shows what’s possible if we are more open, to others and to ourselves.
We live in interesting social times, in which some core principles that we might have thought were more or less settled in our kindergarten class are now questioned by our political leadership. Just last month, Elon Musk declared that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy” and that it has been “weaponized.” Emin’s full-throated cry of humanity thus comes along at just the right time. The actual work of empathy is hard. But why shouldn’t we want the strength — personal and social — that comes with the acceptance that follows?
“Tracey Emin: I Loved You Until the Morning” runs at Yale Center for British Art, 1080 Chapel St., through Aug. 10. Visit the museum’s website for hours and more information.
