NEW HAVEN, Conn. — Tracey Emin’s wrenching, confessional paintings at the Yale Center for British Art evoke emotions that are so intense you almost feel you are in the room with her.
Emin’s process for painting them was just as turbulent. During a preview of the show, the British artist’s first significant museum exhibition in North America opening March 29, her creative director Harry Weller said Emin would work between the hours of 6pm and 3am, and frequently struck the canvas as she expressed the trauma she experienced due to rape and surgeries for bladder cancer.
“She was screaming at it and hit it so hard that she punctured the canvas,” Weller said while playing a video on his phone of Emin attacking the painting. “That rage comes through her work.”
The stately Louis Kahn-designed museum is reopening to the public later this month, after a two-year, $16.5 million renovation. In addition to Emin’s exhibition in the temporary galleries, a few hundred selections of the YCBA’s 2,464 paintings and sculptures and 56,810 prints and drawings will be dispersed throughout its courtly fourth floor, organized by era from the 1500s through the 20th century — from J.M.W. Turner and John Constable to Cecily Brown.
The YCBA’s return comes at a critical time for institutions of higher education. Yale University has preemptively reduced spending on hiring and new construction as President Trump targets academic and cultural institutions — this month alone, the Department of Education began probing 50 colleges, including Yale, for prioritizing diversity initiatives in their programs and admissions practices. The State Department cut funding for a Yale lab’s work tracking Ukrainian children illegally abducted and taken to Russia. Law school professors warned their international students not to leave the country as the Trump administration ponders a strict travel ban. Additional cuts to medical research, humanities programs, libraries, and museums may not be far behind.
As the nation’s institutions are being attacked from within, the YCBA once again serves as an oasis for students and a beacon for scholars studying the modern era of British civilization.
The core of the museum’s collection spans 1750 to 1850, a period marked by the Industrial Revolution. Viewers can trace the rapid shifts in society that developed as people migrated from bucolic landscapes to the grittier streets of 19th-century London. Several paintings illustrate the hardships of life in far-flung colonies as well as the class tensions inherent in portraits of servants at country estates. A jarring right turn at the end of the exhibition propels guests to a handful of abstract works from the 20th century, when the peak of Great Britain’s power began to wane.
Those looking to explore more of the early Industrial Revolution can continue to the third floor for a special exhibition featuring more than 77 paintings, drawings, and prints by Turner, including works like the iconic “Inverary Pier, Loch Fyne: Morning” (c. 1845). The show traces his evolution from watercolors he made as a teenager to oil paintings of riveting landscapes of coastal Italy and the French Alps to prints of maritime scenes from his longtime home in Margate, on England’s southeast coast.
But the stunning Emin show alone, spanning the second and ground floors, is worth the trip on Metro-North. The exhibition includes paintings she created for her solo show at the 2007 Venice Biennale, several bronze sculptures, and large canvases with arresting shades of red and drippy figures she made after being in a serious relationship for the first time in 10 years. There are also a number of smaller, more recent works of bedridden figures with crosses affixed above them that she drew after recovering from surgery that forced her to live with an ileostomy bag.
The museum’s exhaustive collection of British works across multiple centuries provides another lesson: Even the world’s most powerful empires end someday.
