You Let me Fall

Since the beginning of time, the pictorial arts have often sought to visualize the eternal questions concerning creation and man’s place within it. When the visual arts began to develop further in the Middle Ages, the pictorial program often revolved around the construction of the large cathedrals and smaller churches in the cities and the countryside. It was here, through sculptural decoration and mural painting, that the church sought to illustrate, for the usually illiterate congregations, the benefits of following God’s commandments (and the consequences of disobeying them). Depictions of hell and its demons now became more and more common. This was not only confined to clerical buildings but was also to be found in the extraordinary handwritten and illustrated books painstakingly produced, often over years and decades, by dedicated monks.

One famous example is to be found in the remarkable Codex Gigas, or The Devil’s Bible (the National Library of Sweden, Stockholm) that was written/illustrated, in the present-day western Czech lands, at some point between 1204 and 1230. The Codex Gigas comprises 310 vellum leaves, each 89 x 49 cm and weighs more than 75 kg! Legend has it that the manuscript was produced during one single night! A member of the monastic community, placed in isolation for his trespasses, undertook to scribe his encompassing text to atone for his sins. In despair, he turned to the devil for assistance. This helping hand, however, came at a price – relinquishing his soul to the devil and the promise that he would include a prominent portrait of the devil in the final version. The portrait of the devil, one of the undoubtedly most famous aspects of the Codex Gigas, has captivated the imaginations of many, and given birth to numerous tales including that the manuscript itself is imbued with magical properties.

The early modern period (ca 1500 – 1800) gave us further imaginative depictions of hell and its demons. Famous examples are to be found by the Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painters in northern Europe. Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450 – 1516) famous triptych The Last Judgement (c. 1495 – 1505, oil on wood, 99.5 x 117.5 cm, Groeningemuseum, Bruges, Belgium) is one good example. Others are to be found in works like The Fall of the Rebel Angels (1562, oil on panel, 117 x 162 cm, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels) and its, potential, pendant Dulle Griet (1563, oil on panel, 115 x 161 cm, Museum Mayer van den Bergh, Antwerp, Belgium), both by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525 – 1569).

The Enlightenment, which occurred in the 17th and 18th centuries, brought with it a shift in perspectives. From the 19thcentury, and onwards, new disciplines within the expanding field of natural sciences and philosophy gradually made artists, when sourcing ideas for compositions, look less towards colourful depictions of folklore and biblical themes, and more towards man himself and the conditions that dictated human existence. Depictions of hell could now be put down on canvas in gruesomely realistic scenes revealing cruelty between human beings. Or in the words of the French existentialist philosopher, author and Nobel laureate Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980): “L’enfer, c’est les autres” (“Hell is other people”). Well known examples here could be found in Spain, where Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746 – 1828) famously immortalized the horrors of war in The Third of May 1808 (1814, oil on canvas, 266 x 345 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid), acknowledged as one of the first paintings of the modern era (1800 - ), where a French army firing squad is brutally executing Spanish resistance fighters. Interestingly enough, this piece inspired another Spanish work, also regarded as one of the great masterpieces of international art history: Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937, oil on canvas, 349 x 776 cm, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid). A monumental canvas, depicting the aftermath of the bombing (carried out by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy at the request of the Spanish nationalists during the Spanish Civil War, 1936 – 1939) of a town in the Basque Country, that is considered the most moving and powerful anti-war painting in history.

What about Tracey Emin then? A celebrated artist of international fame, known for autobiographical and confessional work, she is no stranger to pain and suffering herself. One could actually argue that she, throughout her life, has repeatedly been to hell and back. Each time with a new tale to tell and stronger than before.

Her, possibly, most celebrated work: My Bed (1998), a readymade installation consisting of her own unmade bed, for instance was inspired by a depressive phase in her life when she had remained in bed for four days without eating or drinking (anything but alcohol) and having sexual intercourse while undergoing a period of severe emotional flux. The bed, in ways a truer rendering of hell than anything either Bosch or Bruegel could have thought up, was presented as it had been when she had stayed in it feeling suicidal because of relationship difficulties. The artwork, shockingly, included empty cigarette boxes, used condoms and underwear with menstrual stains.

In many of her autobiographical works, Emin, unlike most of us, openly discusses the darker aspects of human existence with a brutality that is only superseded by her total honesty. As her presentation, on White Cube’s web page, puts it:

Tracey Emin looks to her life for her primary material. With soul-searching candour, she probes the construct of the self but also the very impulse to create. Unfiltered, irreverent, raw, she draws on the fundamental themes of love, desire, loss and grief in works that are disarmingly and unashamedly emotional. ‘The most beautiful thing is honesty, even if it’s really painful to look at’, she has remarked.

Emin’s work, in general, has been analysed within the context of early adolescent and childhood abuse and sexual assault. Emin was raped at the age of 13 while living in Margate, United Kingdom, citing assaults in the area as “what happened to a lot of girls.” Emin later said, in an article she wrote for the Evening Standard, that she had “no memory of being a virgin”, citing numerous times she was raped as a young teenager. Such harrowing and deeply personal experiences would result in paintings like They Held Me Down While He Fucked me 1976 (2018). In her review (Wallpaper, 27 July 2022) of Emin’s exhibition A Fortnight of Tears (White Cube Bermondsey, London) Harriet Llloyd-Smith wrote:

“They Held Me Down While He Fucked Me 1976” and “But You Never Wanted me” (both 2018) are two of the many portraits depicting gestural female nudes – presumably Emin – reclining, sleeping, bleeding and masturbating. The paint seeps in visceral layers riddled with trauma, rage, rejection and sexual aggression – Schiele-esque in twisted, gritty composition and Munch-like in eerie dilution.

Egon Schiele (1890 – 1918) and Edvard Munch (1863 – 1944) are acknowledged sources of inspiration for Emin, and her relationship with sex is a major theme and aspect of her work. Feminist writers have reviewed Emin’s pieces as containing, “…no element of eroticism or titillation…unlike in Botticelli, Renoir or Klimt. Nor is it sexual fantasy or dreams, as we might find in surrealism, or the sex of the brothel featured so heavily in late 19th-century French art. It is real, everyday sex—as experienced by her, of course, but also by millions of other people.”

You Let me Fall is related to the paintings from the White Cube Bermondsey exhibition of 2022. Painted, the same year, in free-flowing contours and visceral red paint the depiction of a nude female body (Emin?) sprawls out unashamedly on her back, with legs spread and breasts uncovered, defiantly (or triumphantly?) meeting the gaze of the viewer (a compositional set-up familiar from, amongst other celebrated contemporary artists, Lucian Freud [1922 – 2011] in, for example, Naked portrait [2004 – 2005, oil on canvas, 102 x 81 cm]).

Emin’s new paintings (2018 – 2022), illustrated through impassioned contours -but still transient enough as if they might vanish at any moment-, are related to two major recent events in her own life: battling - and beating – cancer, and finding love, thus dealing with the realities of death and the tenderness of human connection, with each piece embodying the strength she’s found in facing her mortality. By sheer willpower, Emin excavates this vulnerability, chiselling out figurative portraits that celebrate life’s intensity and resilience. These works interrogate fear but also gesture to her renewed hope in the world, following her experience falling in love again. “Love had actually pulled me out of the grave”, she affirmed. Despite her severe health challenges, Emin recently said that she has “achieved more in the last three years than in the rest of her life. I’m more content than I’ve ever been and with all its hell and disabilities; the cancer has made me like myself so much more.”

It’s here, in the trap between death and eternal love, that Emin’s purpose for making art becomes clear: “One of the most beautiful things about art is we’re holding hands with all this history”, she recently stated. In Emin’s specific case she’s holding hands with previous masters like Bosch and Bruegel, but this time around it’s a woman, not just holding hands but also a paintbrush, while telling the ancient story of hell and redemption, from a female perspective.

Provenance

White Cube Gallery.

Firestorm.

Exhibitions

Art Basel Miami Beach, 6 – 10 December 2023.

Copyright Firestorm Foundation