Her Scream

Royal Academy of Arts

Tracey Emin / Edvard Munch

The Loneliness of the Soul

5 November 2020 — 28 February 2021

Review

What I found most appealing during my tour to Tracy Emin/ Edward Munch: The Loneliness of the Soul show, was an intense sense of retrogression between inside and outside that their dialogue creates. Suppose you forget the artists' names, the fact that they are two separate entities with a hundred years between their lives. In that case, the exhibition manages an unpredictable accord, a telling in a mutual alphabet concerning the tearing self.

Emin, admittedly profoundly inspired by the Norwegian artist, opens a direct/indirect dialogue with Munch's artworks specially chosen by her. Some of her paintings are straight answers to specific of his works – as the Crouching Nude (1917-1919)—, while almost all of them seem to have adopted particular elements of his artistic idioms (e.g., all this "bloodish" red, the wildness of the hair and the postures). The deepest core thought, around which the whole exhibition is turning, is a ghostly interaction between a "she" and a "he". A vulnerable she and a curious spectator, a woman-painter searching for herself and a man-painter observing the expressions of the female body. Although there is an honest empathy, there is also the –blameless— ignorance of the beholder, ahead with his fear for the Woman. It is from there that Emin takes the lead and goes on.  

Born in 1863 Edward Munch had been a forerunner of the expressionism movement while in his paintings there are often strong symbolisms. From an early age, his life was marked by drama and loss, losing his mother and his beloved sister of tuberculosis. As he has confessed, anxiety had been his permanent companion, and it is felt running all over his work.

Born exactly 100 years later, Tracy Emin had a controversial pathway through the arts, being one of the notorious Young British Artists and producing neo-expressionistic self-referential and autobiographical work using several media. Her work is rough and emotional contacting social criticism through personal stories and creates a, sometimes deliberately uncomfortable, intimacy with her audience. Emin, as well as Munch, appears to struggle with trauma continuously.

 In both artists' artworks exhibited in the RA show, woman figure has a central position as a particular source of pain: for Emin, it is the very pain of (her) existence, for Munch the pain of loneliness, desire and loss.

Using the outline of the body —its outer surface— in Munch's imagery as a start line and embracing the expressionistic gesture, Emin's work goes on deep into the inside or her inside. The inherent woman pain, the trauma, the love-despair, the solitude, the lust, the ageing. All those issues that Munch had also tried to approach, empathically, through his metaphysical and spiritual pro-expressionism idiom, but inevitably from the outside. If Emin's aim -now or always- was to complete his survey on woman loneliness and pain, her method is a gradual decomposition of his artistic alphabet.

Her drawings manage a sensitive balance between the real and the psychic while her inclination towards the abstraction meets, on the one hand, the praxis of the tearing self on the other Munch innate urge "to break areas and lines". To achieve it she hangs on his pink and red colours, the flesh and the blood, sometimes reaching "gore" extremes. All the rest —including his backgrounds— are diluting in basic black and white lines.

Paintings as Weeping Woman (1907-1909), Reclining Nude (1914-1915), Standing female nude (1918-1923) or Female nude (1919-1924) could be seen as points of departure for most Emin's paintings. Here they are the red faces, the blood insinuations, her characteristic postures. Munch's quiet female grief, though, in her works becomes a loud and gory suffering. Far beyond Nordic melancholy her paintings —titled or accompanied by words like "ruined", "devoured" or "trapped"— give the impression of a crime scene. As body and soul become one, Emin answers to Munch's sincere interrogation about woman suffering, with her own "scream", articulated in works like I Became Your World (2015-2017) or This is life without You -You made me Feel like This (2018), not through the face but through the body, the female tantalized naked body, her -wet by fear- cunt, her blood.