The new dynamic duo: Tracey Emin and Edvard Munch
I didn’t see this one coming – Tracey Emin and Edvard Munch as co-exhibitors; but fellow art critic Jonathan Jones did in 2019 when he wrote of equivalency between Munch’s “The Scream” and Emin’s “My Bed” (a sack strewn with the debris of an unhappy love life – empty whiskey bottles, used condoms and sheets stained with semen and menstrual blood). This month, the Royal College of Art in London has launched an Emin/Munch show calling it “The Loneliness of the Soul.”
Out of bed
I scoffed at what Jones wrote last year because “The Bed” always struck me as a gag since it debuted in 1999. I still think that am glad to report that neither “The Bed” nor “The Scream” is in the Royal College show. Comparing such work in a research university like the Royal College would have been the giddy limit. Instead, the college focuses on images by Emin and Munch of women in despair.
Of course, plenty of artists have pictured despair. Roualt, for example, went so far as to use outcasts as his models to better put across anguish. So, what makes Emin’s work such a pointed match for Munch?
Kindred spirits
The answer begins with the unblushing willingness to share her angst with the viewer, and in a way so matter-of-factly, so unceremoniously, that her imagery practically normalizes the state of a desolate mind. Munch, in turn, makes an art of this.
With exhibit pictures sent to me together with the words of these two artists cited in books and art journals, they match so closely, it’s a wonder I never noticed it before. Most noticeable, though, is that unlike “The Bed,” Emin’s work here shines through as unforced and heartfelt. And something else.
Emin’s aim is Munch’s, too. Making art is not about “art,” she said in the exhibit catalog. It’s about expression. “Art” was too cold, too intellectual for her. “Picasso was about ‘art.’ Munch wasn’t. He was about expression.” Which is why he’s been Emin’s hero since she was a teen.
And even more than the “loneliness of the soul,” the angst in the art of Emin and Munch is about sickness. A whole lot of sickness.
The Art Newspaper reports that Emin has been battling cancer that required a “grueling surgery” that emptied her of many organs. Munch, in turn, was obsessed with sickroom images and the despairing figures of his parents that inhabited his childhood. His sister died of TB and his parents acted out their fears with him.
Munch’s image “Vampire” describes a raven-haired female that gives the impression of dripping blood as she cradles a male’s head buried in her lap. He causes his figures to look uncomfortable in order to emphasize the difficulty of the human condition.
That condition is on Emin’s mind lately. She told the Art Newspaper that she has “come down off my high horse” since her diagnosis. “I think when I was younger, I had more blind ambition. Now I haven’t got that at all.” And it shows, Tracy, it shows.
Photo credit: Edvard Munch’s “Crouching Nude,” (left), and Tracey Emin’s Courtesy Emin and Xavier Hufkens