In praise of tracey emin | thearticle

Tracey Emin is alive. This is not a sentence that I or anybody else thought we would be writing in 2022. The last time the world heard from her, in a _Times_ interview in October 2021, the

artist thought she was dying of an aggressive cancer that had begun in her bladder and already necessitated the removal of several other organs too, including her uterus, her urethra, parts

of her colon and her vagina. Last year’s Royal Academy exhibition that showed her work alongside that of Edvard Munch, her “favourite artist of all time”, looked certain to be her last.

Asked about her ambition, she told Decca Aitkenhead: “To get past Christmas would be a good one.”   Yet here she still is, not one but two Christmases later. In another _Times_ interview,

this time with the critic Waldemar Janusczak (behind a paywall), Ms Emin seems amazed that she is not only still with us, but free of cancer and about to embark on a grand new project.

Having already used her mere presence to turn Margate into a magnet for other artists, she has now acquired a large site known locally as “the compound” to institutionalise art in what was

once a seaside backwater. The site consists of a bathhouse, a car park and a mortuary. Ms Emin plans to transform it into a free art school, with 30 artists’ studios, an exhibition space and

a “mini-museum” for her own work. She also hopes to create residencies for artists so that they can work on their careers full-time: “I’m not having people having part-time jobs and then

never coming in.” She won’t tolerate any louche, bohemian behaviour: “People will have to apply and there’ll be really strict rules. No sub-letting, no smoking, no loud music.” So, no

budding Tracey Emins, then? Readers may smile at such stringency coming from the artist who is still defined by _My Bed_: that filthy image of chaos and excess which won her the Turner Prize

in 1997, giving her instant fame and fortune — but at the price. Her reputation as an _enfant terrible _has hung around her neck ever since: her life has overshadowed her art and denied her

the recognition as a serious painter that she evidently craves. Ms Emin never cared for the conceptualist wave on which she rode to celebrity, having always preferred old-fashioned

figurative, pictorial art to the installations of which _My Bed_ was perhaps the most notorious. She has been Professor of Drawing at the RA for more than a decade, but every interviewer

still has to bang on about that bloody bed. Having survived cancer against the odds, Ms Emin is now determined to create “an artist’s haven” in Margate: “I love art. And I love property. And

this way I’m combining both my loves and doing a bit of good.”   How many other contemporary artists can claim as much? Hostile critics may point out, not entirely without justification,

that Ms Emin has brilliantly leveraged a modest talent to make herself perhaps the most influential figure on the British art scene today. But her nude self-portraits, drawn over the past

two years during lockdown, remind us that she can indeed draw very well. And her readiness to risk comparison with a great master such as Munch shows that she appreciates painterly skills

and draughtsmanship in others, too. We must hope that the Tracey Emin art complex will spawn a renaissance of the great tradition of Western art. Who knows? Perhaps future art historians

will see her as the progenitor of a “Margate School”. Many old masters in other times and places have functioned in this way, from the Athens of Phidias to the Venice of Titian or the Paris

of Picasso. Never before, though, has an artist acted as a patron, too, on the scale now envisaged by Ms Emin. A woman who made herself a byword for self-indulgence is devoting her

considerable wealth to other, as yet unknown, artists. There are worse ways to spend money than to leave a living legacy — and some of her more sybaritic rivals might be shamed into

following her example. Let us hope that she lives to see it through.   Surprisingly for an artist who loves to _épater les bourgeois, _Ms Emin is a Commander of the Order of the British

Empire (CBE). Since the death of Lucian Freud in 2011, the only artist who can still boast membership of both the Order of Merit and the Companions of Honour is David Hockney, now 84. I

would not be surprised to read that Tracey Emin had accepted one of these honours. She has certainly done enough to deserve it. A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s

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