Tracey Emin: The Last Great Adventure is You review – a lesson in how to be a real artist
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Version 0 of 1. Drawing is a cruel art. Like any skilled medium with a long history, it imposes rules, traditions and standards that an artist cannot simply ignore. To make a drawing is to try to get something right, just as much as playing a piece of music is. In short, you can either draw or you can’t draw. Tracey Emin can. Her new exhibition at White Cube in Bermondsey is a masterclass in how to use traditional artistic skills in the 21st century. Where other artists of her generation look stupid when they take up charcoals or brushes, and undermine the myth of talent their readymades may have created – I shudder at the memory of Damien Hirst’s last painting show – it turns out Emin was sitting on a suitcase of spare ability all along. The nudes that lead into this exhibition, a line of framed blue meditations on the human body, prove Emin’s graphic line is not a one-trick wonder of mannerism but a subtle, acute, thoughtful engagement with the visual world. Great drawing has to be done from life. That’s what makes it hum and sing with vitality. Emin’s nudes have that sense of real observation. They are self-portraits: hard-fought ones. She’s looking in the mirror and striking a pose, just like the old masters did. She just happens to be naked when she does so. These nudes are eerie, poetic and beautiful. Faces are left blank or blotched out. Flowing and pooling lines of gouache define form with real authority. The human figure is just as expressive as the human face. Michelangelo knew that and so does Emin. The rough, unfinished suggestiveness of her style evokes pain, suffering, and solitude – but the classical poses of these bodies also communicate a heroic strength. When she translates her designs into black embroideries on white calico, the magnified scale is even more heroic. The body electric rules in majesty. Matisse, Picasso, Titian and the boys have drawn and painted the bodies of women in so many ways, for so long, that it is no exaggeration to call the female nude the great tradition of western painting. Emin claims this high ground and about time, too. It is an attack on the patriarchal temple. She not only invades the museum, she shakes it to the core. Her convincing repossession of nude beauty as an artistic theme is just the beginning of this radical exhibition. Emin is an expressionist. Whether she’s using readymade objects or sketching, her true purpose is to communicate passion. The reason she is the most important British artist of her generation is that she really does have a powerful subject – her life, like anyone’s life, is interesting; it matters. Why not share it? Here she rises to heights of beauty and depths of horror as she shares epiphanies of love and loneliness. In the biggest gallery, the classical poise of her nudes gives way to raw sex and crumbling images caught in fleshy paint. Lumpen, broken bodies made of bronze lie in pitiful agony. The body screams. The nude, as the great critic Kenneth Clark once pointed out, is not only an art of beauty but of pathos. Emin bares her soul by portraying humiliations of the flesh. As the confidence of her drawing seems to break and fail, what’s left is despair. The artist who can express herself with a bed can also express herself, deeply and movingly, in gouache and bronze. Every student, every teenager who loves art should see this exhibition. It is a lesson in how to be a real artist. |