British Art in a New Light

New York Times

25-04-2025

On the campus of Yale University, two art museums housed in landmark modernist buildings — each designed by Louis I. Kahn — sit directly across the street from one another. One, the Yale University Art Gallery, with an encyclopedic collection of about 300,000 objects, draws close to a quarter million people annually. The other, the Yale Center for British Art, with its specialized collection of more than 100,000 works from the 15th century to the present, brings in less than half that traffic.
The British center is now aiming to even up those visitor numbers.
It reopened in March after a two-year closure for conservation of the skylights and lighting throughout the building — the acclaimed architect's last realized project, which opened in 1977 and is widely considered an artwork in itself — and with a fresh exhibition philosophy.
A piece by Tracey Emin, who came to fame as one of the so-called Young British Artists in the 1990s alongside peers like Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas, inaugurates a new program of contemporary works in the lobby. Her glowing sculptural installation, with yellow neon lighting proclaiming in script 'I loved you until the morning' on a mirrored wall in the museum's entrance court, is visible from the street. It serves as an 'invitation' at the front door, said Martina Droth, the center's director, who was appointed in January after working with its collections for 16 years, most recently as chief curator.
'The envelope of the building doesn't scream museum; it's a little austere,' she said. 'I'm hoping that it signals to people there are things here for them.'
In two inaugural exhibitions upstairs, large gestural paintings on the second floor focused on the female body by Emin — who established her reputation with confessional, ramshackle sculptural installations — have unexpected resonance with atmospheric landscapes on the third floor drawn from the center's almost 3,000 works by J.M.W. Turner, who was born almost 200 years before Emin and, like her, counted the English seaside town of Margate as an important second home.
This pairing reflects the center's new curatorial approach, Droth said, showcasing the depth and richness of its historical collections 'and then taking those threads into the present moment with someone like Tracey, who absolutely sees herself in the lineage of Margate, famous for Turner and now famous for Tracey, and in those sort of painting traditions.'
Emin's show, her first solo museum exhibition in North America, may introduce the artist to younger viewers or reintroduce her to those who remember 'Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection,' an exhibition that caused a public stir when it traveled to the Brooklyn Museum in 1999. There, Emin showed a tent embroidered with the names of everyone she had ever shared a bed with.
'Showing Tracey here is just a completely different proposition to showing her in Britain, where she's really a public figure and there's so much baggage around her,' said Droth, who organized the show. She has chosen to focus on Emin's painting, which she had struggled with at the Royal College of Art and abandoned early in her career. She resumed the medium after being selected to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2007, when she began to make paintings that center on the subjectivity of the female figure. Since the death of her mother in 2016, Emin has devoted herself to painting and bronze sculpture.
In 2017, Emin bought a home and studio in Margate — where she had a difficult upbringing and was raped at 13 — and has spent most of her time there since 2020. (She also has a home in London.)
'She's depicting the body usually, but it's about the feeling of the body and an atmosphere and a mood,' said Droth, of Emin's paintings that make analogies between her own expressive brushwork and Turner's squalling seascapes.
In the painting 'And It Was Love' (2023), which depicts a naked woman splayed across the canvas and a dark form in a wash of deep sunset red between her bent legs, 'you don't really know whether this is a medical emergency, a sexual scene, pleasure, pain,' Droth said. 'It's all of those things.' She noted the faint trace of the stoma on the figure's abdomen connected to a urostomy bag. (In 2020, Emin was diagnosed with bladder cancer and had radical surgery.)
Reached by phone in Margate, Emin, now 61, described Turner — who lived part-time with his mistress just minutes from Emin's studio — as 'an early expressionist' and said she loved the 'modesty involved' in showing her work in the context of the British center's collection.
'There's a lot of people who might take my work more seriously now, simply because of the subject matter,' she said. 'I have a very strong opinion on being a woman and I think people understand now that I'm not screaming — I'm just making a point of showing the experiences that women go through.'
She wrote a poem to Turner, and to their shared love of Margate's winter sunsets, which is included in a 2024 publication by the center that reproduced his last sketchbook.
If Emin thinks about Turner, obviously Turner — born 250 years ago this year — didn't think about Emin.
Lucinda Lax, the center's curator of paintings and sculpture who organized the Turner exhibition — the center's first since 1993 — called him 'the father of modern art.' She has included 'Margate' (circa 1822), Turner's view of the newly built seaside resort, with broken ships and workers eking out a living in the foreground, and 'Wreckers' (1834), featuring a tumultuous sea and abbreviated figures scavenging what they can from wreckage.
'He's really trying to bring out the experience, both physically and psychologically, of being part of a particular environment,' Lax said, 'where there's a real sort of sense of the splash of the sea and the whip of the wind.'
Lax has also led the fourth-floor re-installation of the permanent collection. 'For the first time, we've got the whole chronological span of British art that's represented in our holdings here on one floor,' said Lax, who has integrated contemporary works by artists including Yinka Shonibare and Cecily Brown into galleries that used to end with the 19th century. She hopes to 'open up questions about empire, gender, the role of women.'
As universities are in jeopardy of having funding cut by the government, which has flagged the use of words including 'gender' or 'women' on institutional websites, the British center is not shying away from 'engaging a diverse range of perspectives in dialogue with British art and history,' Droth said. The museum's annual operating budget of almost $39 million is funded almost entirely from the Paul Mellon endowment, the center's founder who donated his holdings of British art that account for almost 80 percent of its collection.
Yale is widely regarded as having the greatest collection of British art outside of Britain, said Nicholas Cullinan, director of the British Museum in London, who views the pairing of Emin and Turner as inspired.
'For a younger generation, Tracey's work and way of talking about difficult and uncomfortable things with complete honesty is probably very resonant,' Cullinan said, referring to topics such as abortion, surviving abuse and working-class struggles.
'I think that there was a lot of snobbery around those conversations and an attempt to shut them down as being embarrassing or vulgar,' Cullinan added, noting how the art establishment had put Emin in a box early on. 'Now we recognize that those are not just important, but necessary.'