Tracey Emin & Edvard Munch // Royal Academy, London

A Clayton

“… men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”

As we journey out of the cool interiors of the Royal Academy into the blazing heat of Piccadilly Circus June, in breathless quiet consideration of what we have seen, I think of these words by John Berger in his seminal text Ways of Seeing, and wonder if Tracey Emin would appreciate my academic analysis. Probably not, I conclude. Emin has never really given a fuck, right? Except she really does. Her much maligned oeuvre took a turn when she met Jay Jopling, White Cube gallerist and style setter, in 1994. A few years ago I visited her exhibition A Fortnight of Tears at their premises in Bermondsey. It was here that I saw Emin for what felt like the first time. Graphic paintings, voluminous sculptures, and a devastatingly bleak moving image piece resonated through the gallery that positioned Emin in relation to herself, a survey of her surveyed self. These were visceral works, which publicised her shame, her perceived physical failures, with angry brushstrokes and mottled sculptural surfaces.

The Loneliness of the Soul at the Royal Academy has its foundations in that 2019 exhibition. Thematic threads and emotions which have evolved from that time in her life are visible here too. Fundamentally though, we are invited to view her work through a framework of the interior nude, via the psychologically private pictorial spaces described by Edvard Munch, Norwegian Modernist, born a hundred years before Emin. Describing him as her ‘friend in art’, Emin discusses how she has ‘been drawn to the deep and often raw, emotional content of his work.’ (Exhibition Guide) Her selection of his work here, in conjunction with her paintings, form an interrogation into the female inner life and psychological state. On entering the first room, I was immediately drawn to gaze at one of the most violent artworks I have ever seen. Drips of red paint, the colour of menstrual blood, reverberate from the canvas; I see open legs, a wound like anatomy presented at the fore of the picture plane. This was going to be difficult. And I wouldn’t expect anything else. These are absolutely personal. Emin has brought herself right up to the surface, with the abstracted figures receding. On the opposite wall, we see a series of Munch watercolours, all similarly pushing the nude to the front, so that we are directly engaging with that figure. We are intruding, seedily looking into the grief stricken, confined de-sexualised spaces. I get a strong sense of identification through trauma, rather than depicted features; it’s as if the ‘person’ has been scratched out, daubed over with impastoed brushstrokes, replaced with pain, desperation and primal instinct. A really terrifying painting by Matisse, Portrait of Yvonne Landsberg, 1914, comes to mind. In this all identity has been stripped away to reveal a demon; it is a truly gothic rape. Similarly here, Emin has approached herself reductively, to a faceless product of bodily horror.

Also exhibited is her 1994 neon work, my cunt is wet with fear, which appears as a warning, a forward almost, to the rest of the exhibition (and possibly for Emin’s own health - she was diagnosed with aggressive cancer in June 2020). We see Munch’s Women in Hospital, 1897, with its skeletal subject exposing grim desperation, its faceless background figures hunched together. We see odd bronze plinth carvings with tiny clay modelled figurines, and a figure veiled in black, retreating perhaps from insomniacal mania. It’s hard to see this as anything but pain, isolation and trauma. So, enjoyable? Definitely not the right word. Annihilating-ly sad, maybe better. Brave, absolutely. We came out, struggling to describe what we had experienced. Needless to say, I have a print from the gift shop.