C2 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2020LONDON — Edvard Munch wasn’t shy of suf-
fering. When his fiancée accidentally shot
him in the hand, in 1902, he insisted on a lo-
cal rather than a general anesthetic, so that
he could watch the operation to fix the dam-
age.
Now, at the Royal Academy of Arts, the
Norwegian painter has found a kindred
spirit in the contemporary British artist
Tracey Emin, whose work has an equally
unflinching relationship to pain.
Ms. Emin is associated with the Young
British Artists, or Y.B.A.s, who scandalized
the British tabloids in the late 1980s and the
1990s: think of Mat Collishaw’s huge,
blown-up image of a head wound, or Da-
mien Hirst’s shark in formaldehyde. But
Ms. Emin’s work has always blazed with a
more eccentric, confessional energy.
Opening on Monday and running through
Feb. 28, the exhibition was supposed to in-
augurate a new building for the Munch Mu-
seum in Oslo in the spring, but construction
ran behind schedule, and then came the
pandemic. The presentation at the Royal
Academy was also delayed by a four-week
national lockdown in England that has just
ended, and which will only make visitors
more attuned to its title: “The Loneliness of
the Soul.”
Born in 1963, 100 years after Munch, Ms.
Emin has been drawn to Munch since the
start of her career, referencing his bristly,
nervy painting style as far back as her grad-
uating show from the Royal College of Art.
So when the Munch Museum invited her to
select work from its collection to display in
dialogue with her own, it was “a magical
chance of a lifetime,” she said in an acknowl-
edgment in the catalog.
In her Super-8 video “Homage to Edvard
Munch and All My Dead Children,” from
1998, Ms. Emin crouches in a fetal position
at the end of a jetty in a fjord, before releas-
ing a guttural cry that lasts an unbearable
whole minute. The work responds to
Munch’s most famous work, and although
there is plenty of existential angst in the
Royal Academy show, there is no sign of
“The Scream.”
Like Munch, whose output of 1,700 paint-
ings tends to be overshadowed by his great-
est hit, Ms. Emin is still notorious for her
1998 installation “My Bed,” which recon-
structs the artist’s disheveled bedroom af-
ter a drunken night out, complete with
stained sheets, cigarette butts, worn under-
pants, a used condom and empty vodka bot-
tles. That work earned Ms. Emin a nomina-
tion for the Turner Prize, at a time when the
award could make front-page news in Brit-
ain.
“My Bed” will feature in an expanded
version of the exhibition when it finally
reaches Oslo, where it will be Ms. Emin’s
first major show in Scandinavia. But in the
three galleries at the Royal Academy, the fo-
cus is on painting and the female nude, with
18 works by Munch, and 26 by Ms. Emin.
Both artists knew and feared the fallibil-
ity of bodies from an early age. By 1889,
when Munch turned 26, he had already
grieved the deaths of his mother, his sister
and his father; he was prone to alcoholism
and nervous exhaustion. Ms. Emin grew up
in the English seaside town of Margate,
“where there was nothing to do but blend in
with the general decay,” she wrote in her
2005 memoir, “Strangeland.” Her youth fea-
tured years of excessive drinking and abu-
sive sexual relationships, which she called
“a drunken, decadent orgy of creative lust,
pushing myself to the wildest extremes.”
That energy arrests the visitor from the
exhibition’s opening room. Seven large
paintings by Ms. Emin are softly lit against
dark teal walls, which accentuate the vis-
ceral colors of sketched figures writhing
against bare canvas. Discreetly inter-
spersed are Munch’s female nudes: A clus-
ter of 10 studies in watercolor, as well as a
painting of a woman curled forlornly on her
side on a divan and another of a woman sit-
ting naked in bed, her gaze cast aside. Send-
ing a charge through the room is a neon sign
in uppercase letters that refers, using a
crude term, to a vagina “wet with fear.”
Both artists are seduced by, and yet un-
easy with, strong women. Munch had diffi-
cult romantic affairs throughout his life and
never settled in a long-term relationship
(remember his fiancée’s gunshot). In a jour-
nal entry, he wrote that “a lady has permis-
sion to intrigue,” and “seduce a man — ruin
a man with lies.”
In his painting “The Death of Marat II,”
from 1907, a naked woman stands in front of
the sprawled body of a dead man. The title
recalls the murder of the French revolution-
ary Jean-Paul Marat in his bathtub by Char-
lotte Corday, but now Munch appears to be
the victim and there is blood on his hand.
Drawn from her own body, literally and
figuratively, Ms. Emin’s nudes have a differ-
ent power. “You Came to Me at Night,” a
2017 painting, features an ominous, faceless
figure, head slightly lowered, with darkgray brushwork shrouding the torso and
dripping onto the sketched knees and shins
below. Other figures kneel or lie prone, their
submissive positions suggesting a body
that hurts and bleeds, that can be abused,
impregnated and miscarry.
Many critics have been unconvinced by
the emotional register of Ms. Emin’s paint-
ings, considering them to be derivative of
the emotionally expressive scrawls and
dribbles of a pantheon of male artists.
Certainly, there are allusions beyond
Munch, most notably to Egon Schiele’s fe-
brile lines, Cy Twombly’s smudgy white
clouds and shaky lettering, and Francis Ba-
con’s wrestling figures. But Munch also bor-
rowed, from Paul Gauguin, Vincent van
Gogh and Édouard Manet, among others.
The old saying goes that “Good artists copy,
and great artists steal,” but too often we ac-
cuse women of the former and celebrate
men for the latter.
The real sting here is about authenticity.
Can a work course with real pain if it exists
in multiple, or pirates another voice? Does
an expression of trauma have to be unique?
Munch made two paintings, two pastels and
several prints of “The Scream,” yet that im-
age holds its force.
There is no intravenous connection to our
pain. Artists can only work with their ma-
terials, to give an impression of their emo-
tional landscape and perhaps provoke a
sympathetic response in ours.
It is hard not to look at Ms. Emin’s an-
guished figures in light of her recent inter-
view with The Sunday Times of London, in
which she spoke candidly about a brutal
struggle with cancer, including surgery to
remove her uterus, fallopian tubes and ova-
ries, as well as parts of her colon and geni-
tals. Her work has always grappled with the
vulnerability of life, but now the specter of
mortality hangs low, and the poignancy of
these pictures feels more acute.Top, from left: “I Became Your World” and “This is Life Without
You — You Made Me Feel Like This,” by Tracey Emin, and “The
Death of Marat” by Edvard Munch. Below, “Crouching Nude” by
Munch. Bottom, “Every Part of Me Kept Loving You” by Emin.No ‘Scream,’ Just a Double Shot of Angst
TRACEY EMIN/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK; EDVARD MUNCH/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK; DAVID PARRYEDVARD MUNCH/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORKTRACEY EMIN/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK; ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, DACS 2020A London exhibition pairs
works by Edvard Munch with
those by the contemporary
artist Tracey Emin.
ELEANOR NAIRNE ART REVIEW
The Loneliness of the Soul
Through Feb. 29 at the Royal Academy of Arts,
London; royalacademy.org.uk.
Pop critics for The New York
Times weigh in on notable new
songs and videos.
Juice WRLD
and Benny Blanco
REAL ___
. ...................................................................
Next week marks one year since
the death of Juice WRLD, one of
SoundCloud rap’s most promising
luminaries. In honor of what
would have been the Chicago
star’s 22nd birthday, the producer
Benny Blanco released “Real
___,” a previously unheard col-
laboration. Juice’s music often
luxuriates in gloom, but this track
finds him at his most ecstatic:
“Life’s good so I’m living great,”
he proclaims, singing the earnest
praises of vacations, healthy
eating and leg day. But that unbri-
dled joy makes the song even
more poignant than his more
straightforwardly sad material;
he sounds so teeming with life he
wouldn’t get a chance to live.
LINDSAY ZOLADZ
The Weeknd,
featuring Rosalía
BLINDING LIGHTS (REMIX)
. ...................................................................
Rosalía lends her electrifying
presence to yet another sure-
thing collaboration: a year-later
remix of the Weeknd’s a-ha-
meets-Michael Jackson block-
buster, “Blinding Lights.” By
taking the first verse, in Spanish,
she turns it into a lovers’ duet, far
more tense and romantic than the
original. And it’s the Weeknd’s
best revenge for being snubbed
by the Grammys. But where is
Rosalía’s next album?
JON PARELESAll Time Low,
featuring Demi Lovatoand blackbear
MONSTERS. ...................................................................
With this theatrical pop-punk
collaboration, Demi Lovato inches
ever closer to the dreams of her
teenage years, when she sang
throaty Disney teen-pop and
harbored a fascination with heavy
metal.
JON CARAMANICA
Beach Bunny
GOOD GIRLS (DON’T GET USED). ...................................................................
“I’m tired of dumb boy talk,” Lili
Trifilio sings, pulling no punches
on “Good Girls (Don’t Get Used),”
the bouncy new single from the
Chicago indie-poppers Beach
Bunny. Trifilio’s lyrics are incisive,
delivering a pent-up torrent of
hard truths to the noncommittal
guy who’s been sending her
mixed signals: “Stop saying ‘it’s
my bad,’ you’re acting like your
deadbeat dad.” But the song,
which will appear on the band’s
upcoming “Blame Game” EP, is
grounded in her triumphant sense
of self, shaking off the insecurities
she so endearingly confessed on
Beach Bunny’s breakout song
“Prom Queen.” “You’re not a
ghost,” Trifilio shouts this time
with hard-won confidence, “I’m
not afraid of you!”
LINDSAY ZOLADZNana Yamato
IF. ...................................................................
“If” is technically the debut single
from Toyko’s Nana Yamato —
though she used to release
dreamy, homespun bedroom-pop
tunes under the admittedly hard-
er-to-Google name ANNA. The
song is a promising preview of
her debut album, “Before Sun-
rise,” which will be out in Febru-
ary on Andrew Savage of Parquet
Courts’ label Dull Tools. Both
catchy and a little kitschy, “If” is
propelled forward by a jangly
electric guitar and sing-songy
hook (“If you know what I really
need... ”) but occasionally dis-
rupted by charming, doodled
tangents like random laser noises
and an unexpected trumpet solo.
LINDSAY ZOLADZKali Uchis
TELEPATÍA. ...................................................................
“Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros
Demonios),” the second album by
the Colombian-American song-
writer Kali Uchis, goes genre-
hopping and era-hopping, from
romantically retro orchestral
bolero to brittle reggaeton.
“Telepatía” (“Telepathy”) is a
languid, bilingual neo-soul tease,
with plush sustained chords and
simulated horns, as Uchis la-
ments that “the moon is full, my
bed is empty” and wonders about
making love telepathically.
JON PARELES
24kGoldn,
featuring DaBaby
COCO. ...................................................................
24kGoldn’s deceptively tense
“Mood” recently strummed its
way to the top of the Billboard
Hot 100. How does a relatively
untested artist follow such a
success? Well, yes, with a star-
studded remix (with Justin Bie-
ber and J Balvin, though that
proved ineffectual). But really, the
answer is a sideways sequel, a
psst-psst part two, a new song
that one could be forgiven for
thinking was simply the outro to
the old one. Hence, “Coco,” which
is built on similarly parched gui-
tar, and which builds on the same
skepticism as “Mood.” There’s a
perfunctory verse from DaBaby,
but he doesn’t derail 24kGoldn’s
commitment to complaint. Whin-
ing got him this far — why stop?
JON CARAMANICALil Wayne,
featuring Drake
B. B. KING FREESTYLE. ...................................................................
Drake is an (emotionally) anxious
rapper, his mentor Lil Wayne is
an (energetically) anxious rapper.
So it’s refreshing to hear them opt
for a winning calmness on this
collaboration, over neo-soul pro-
duction that sounds like it could
have been an interlude from one
of the “Lyricist Lounge” compila-
tions. Drake ambiently muses on
the usual stressors — “I may not
be good for her but I’m real to
her/Got no time for her but give
Richard Mille to her.” But it’s Lil
Wayne who’s truly Zen, afloat in a
vortex of internal rhyme and
syllabic cha-cha.
JON CARAMANICA
PLAYLIST
A Bittersweet Juice WRLD Team-Up, and 7 More Songs
A collaboration between Juice WRLD, above, who died a year ago, and Benny Blanco came out last week.MATT WINKELMEYER/GETTY IMAGES FOR IHEARTMEDIANo day is complete
without
The New York Times.