FIVE years ago she moved her bed into Tate Britain. Now she returns to set up a more permanent home. Tracey Emin is officially anointed an icon of British culture as the Tate, having recently bulk-bought a batch of her works, now honours her with her very own gallery space.
But should Emin be so eminent? Few artists are accorded the privilege of a dedicated room at the Tate; those that do include Turner, Constable and Blake. Of this exceptional trio, the last two had to wait a lifetime or longer for proper recognition. “No painter of equal genius was ever less known in his own country,” declared C. R. Leslie of his great friend John Constable. William Blake lived all his life an impoverished journeyman engraver. He died and was buried in a cheap common grave.
But Emin soars to instant celebrity in modern confessional culture. Her dyslexically annotated drawings, her crudely appliquéd slogans and neon signs about anal sex, accord perfectly with a culture which revels in life’s most abject details. “She represents that peculiar mix of vulnerability and brashness, of anxiety and exuberance that is typical of traits that became apparent in the 1990s,” says Stephen Deuchar, the Director of Tate Britain.
But a forthcoming Tate Britain show puts such notoriety in salutary context. The first large-scale exhibition to focus on the work of sibling artists, Augustus and Gwen John, opens this month. The former, a flamboyant bohemian, who had an enticingly scandalous life, was the most famous artist at the turn of the century. As the premier society portraitist, he circulated in the grandest society. But his celebrity was a mask that ate into his face. He increasingly resorted to self-parody, to showy pastiche.
The reclusive life and the almost painfully intimate pictures of his sister, Gwen, could scarcely have cut a stronger contrast. In her day she was known merely as Augustus’s sister. But he once declared: “Fifty years after my death I shall be remembered as Gwen John’s brother.” Those 50 years have almost passed. The quiet, self-contained Gwen comes into her rightful inheritance. Flaubert’s dictum — “You must be natural and regular in your habits as a bourgeois in order to be violent and original in your work” — strikes a resonant note of warning in a world swept up in a fascination for celebrity flash.
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Good artists are slowly discovered. Bad artists are slowly found out. For every Emin flouncing into a party in a Vivienne Westwood frock, there is a Gwen John whom we will one day learn to appreciate.