THE NEW CRITERION, June 2025
On “Tracey Emin: I Loved You Until The Morning” & the newly reopened Yale Center for British Art.
When the Yale Center for British Art first dropped anchor in 1977 on the far side of New Haven’s Chapel Street, the cultural ocean-liner arrived as one of the last great vessels from the golden age of American museum-making. The center was the product of an unprecedented 1966 gift to Yale by Paul Mellon. A philanthropist, Anglophile, and member of the class of 1929, he gathered together the largest single collection of British art outside of the United Kingdom and gave it to the public trust. Paul Mellon came to the arts of Great Britain as the son of the American industrialist Andrew W. Mellon, who served as ambassador to the Court of St. James, and an English mother, Nora McMullen. Paul Mellon assembled and donated his collection much as his father had done in founding the National Gallery of Art some three decades earlier in Washington, D.C. Like his father, he funded the construction of a building to house his bequests and an endowment to maintain them—ensuring his museum would be free and open to the public in perpetuity, as well as quasi-independent of the university and its other attendant interests.
Tapping the architect Louis I. Kahn to design a sister ship to his Yale University Art Gallery building of 1953, berthed just across Chapel Street, the YCBA came to occupy one of the finest museum buildings of the last half century. Kahn, who died three years before its completion, commanded an alchemic sense for elevating mass. His integration of concrete and steel, white oak and Belgian linen, set his building afloat, while his attention to natural light, channeled through a grid of 224 skylights, illuminated Mellon’s collection in an energizing glow.
Entrance-court skylights, Yale Center for British Art. Photo: Richard Caspole.
Today Mellon’s bequest still makes up 80 percent of the holdings of the Yale Center for British Art—now comprising some 2,000 paintings, 250 sculptures, 20,000 drawings and watercolors, 35,000 prints, 3,000 photographs, and 35,000 rare books and manuscripts, with a particularly notable selection of British art from the 1720s to the 1850s. Recently the center has been rightly attending to the physical plant that houses these treasures through a series of meticulous renovations. In “Conserving Kahn,” the architect George Knight, whose firm has overseen this two-decade-long project, wrote about its challenges for the December 2016 issue of The New Criterion. Textile finishes and artificial lighting, skylight domes and electrical systems have all required special attention to keep Kahn’s building shipshape and Bristol fashion. Now completing its second multiyear closure in under twenty years, the center has again reopened with a reinstallation of its collection and new special exhibitions, including collection shows focused on its holdings of J. M. W. Turner and George Romney.
Mellon’s farsighted beneficence has more than ensured the financial seaworthiness of his institution, now more than a quarter century after his death at age ninety-one in 1999. The institution boasts an annual operating budget of nearly $40 million, mostly sourced from its endowment, which is more than enough to attend to its collection with money to spare for its fastidious upkeep—$16 million for the latest round, to the envy of Yale’s other, relatively poorer cultural redoubts.
Despite its financial buoyancy, or perhaps even because of the independent resources that have kept it afloat like a cork, the Yale Center for British Art has recently seemed adrift. Years of leadership churn with a listless affinity for the England of Gainsborough and Reynolds, Constable and Stubbs has taken its toll. Rather than right the ship, the Yale Center for British Art is now steaming away from the safe harbor of its founding with only increasing contempt for its permanent collection.
In 2020 the YCBA removed its very first acquisition, a portrait of Elihu Yale, from public view in an elaborate ceremony of contemporary cancellation. Attributed to John Verelst (ca. 1675–1734), the painting had been a gift to Yale from Andrew Cavendish, the eleventh Duke of Devonshire, in honor of Mellon’s British initiative. Formerly known as Elihu Yale; William Cavendish, the second Duke of Devonshire; Lord James Cavendish; Mr. Tunstal; and an Enslaved Servant, the work was denounced by the “Elihu Yale Portrait Research Team,” formed by the center’s then-director, for its depiction of its unnamed servant. The team called the painting a “stark reminder of Britain’s entrenchment in the transatlantic slave trade.” The painting was publicly stripped of its historical title and subsequently “referred to here by its accession number, B1970.1.” In place of B1970.1, the YCBA then erected a reinterpreted work by Titus Kaphar called Enough About You (2016), which reimagined the painting with a golden frame around the servant figure and the rest of the canvas as a crumpled lump.
Roof and skylight domes, Yale Center for British Art. Photo: Richard Caspole.
Other paintings in Mellon’s collection met a similar fate of interrogation, denunciation, and public shaming. The YCBA’s latest rehanging, called “In a New Light: Five Centuries of British Art,” further strips collection highlights from the main galleries and replaces them with interventions selected for their political identities rather than primarily aesthetic interest. A large 2017 sculpture by the British Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare, for example, whose work “uses citations of Western art history and literature to question the validity of contemporary cultural and national identities within the context of globalisation,” according to the artist’s website, now greets visitors to the permanent collection. Next up in October will be a survey of the British Guyanese artist Hew Locke, a sculptor who works, according to the center, in the “postcolonial baroque.” Meanwhile, paintings such as John Martin’s The Deluge (1834) have been relegated to the Long Gallery, a room that now functions as open storage with two hundred works hung floor to ceiling, their identities only available on a forty-page printout.
Martina Droth, a YCBA curator and its new director as of January, has continued the center’s intersectional inquest by moving on from race to extend the identitarian trinity to class and gender, all now with a celebrity flourish. At the center of these efforts is Droth’s promotion of a self-styled champion of working-class women, and in particular herself—the artist Tracey Emin.
“Tracey Emin: I Loved You Until The Morning” is the title of the Yale Center for British Art’s flagship reopening exhibition.1 “I loved you until the morning” is likewise how one might feel after visiting today’s Yale Center for British Art. The interventions begin in the building’s Entrance Court. Here the center has commissioned a mirrored neon installation based on Emin’s scribbled handwriting featuring the title of her show. What was once a dappled introduction to the treasures within, with a view to the rooftop skylights and the gallery floors opening onto a lightwell, is now “good for selfies,” as Droth explained at the opening preview. The twenty-four-hour-a-day electric banner, here a quasi–work of art, also does an end run around the building’s prohibition on signage. This is Louis I. Kahn’s Cunard Queen of a museum rebranded as a Carnival fun-ship cruise.
Tracey Emin, You Kept it Coming, 2019, Acrylic on canvas, Private collection. © HV-Studio, courtesy of the artist and Xavier Hufkens.
The carnivalesque atmosphere continues through Emin’s special exhibition, a besotted assembly of nineteen paintings along with sculpture and works on paper spread across the museum’s second-floor gallery. Touring these sketchy compositions of splattered reds and female undercarriage, we can learn how one canvas, I Said No (ca. 2005–15), confronts the artist’s teenage rape. Emin’s stoma, tube, and urostomy bag, a consequence of her bladder-cancer surgery of 2020, get referenced through a dashed-off line and bloody square in And It Was Love (2023). One work reflects an act of cunnilingus by Emin’s ex-boyfriend. In another there is an abortion table. Still another is titled I Wanted You to F*ck the Inside of My Mind (2018). And so on.
A faux-naif in creative matters, especially her own promotion, Emin has been riding a wave of notoriety since the heady days of the Young British Artists in the 1990s. Trained as a painter—one who did, in fact, produce Bonnard-like portraits in her student years—she soon focused on the marketing of her own overexposure to command headlines if not critical acclaim. “It wasn’t like I wanted a career in painting. I wanted to be an artist,” she explains of her turn to shock.
Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (1995), a tent embroidered with the names of her supposed bedmates, entered the collection of Charles Saatchi and toured with the infamous “Sensation” show. My Bed, the 1998 installation that turned the unmade into a Readymade, recreated her slatternly sleeping arrangements as an installation of dirty sheets, condoms, underwear, contraceptives, alcohol bottles, cigarettes, and pills. This “big, giant, seminal piece of work,” as she aptly called it, was exhibited at the Tate but almost incinerated as a biohazard by customs officials when first touring Japan.
Emin returned to painting in 2007, first to represent Britain in an underwhelming display at the Venice Biennale and later as a primary mode of production. Whether working in acrylic or video, embroidery or published writing, Emin has long seemed incapable, or at least unwilling, to make art about anything but herself. For thirty years her body of work has been her body as public defilement—prurient advertisements that could be collected and exchanged in a multitude of media. In her catalogue essay, Martina Droth argues that
Critics, many of them in the popular press, have routinely—and willfully—mistaken her work for unmediated autobiography, accusing her of narcissism, a desire to shock, and an obsession with publicity and fame.
Routinely willfully mistaken? Emin’s self-obsessed oeuvre suggests little otherwise.
Tracey Emin, I Followed You to The End, 2024, Acrylic on canvas, White Cube. © Tracey Emin, courtesy of the artist and White Cube.
Emin’s elective abortion of 1990, for example, has become a recurring talking point. Her elevation of the abortion in her public persona—in one case painting publicly while naked to “exorcise” the episode, in another recording a video of her peregrinations to the abortion clinic—has kept her in the British eye and, she claims, helped to make her career. “I wasn’t going to go all the way through the Royal College of Art,” she says, “get this amazing education, learn to paint, and then be a single mother.” In her catalogue essay, Droth cheers the results:
The prospect of single motherhood, social housing, and poverty . . . led her to seek an abortion. . . . In the mid-1990s Emin began to recognize her pregnancy and abortion as experiences inextricably bound to her self-understanding as an artist. . . . [P]regnancy stood for the end of Emin’s art, and abortion came to mean its survival. . . . [T]he history of painting is a history that includes Emin at all only because she chose not to become a single mother.
For all of the museum world’s cross examination of its collections, it is curious how some mythologies still go unchallenged, such as the role of galleries and collectors in Emin’s commercial self-abasement. Even as the museum consulted with “consent educators” and the gender-studies department to “develop the content warning and programming around the show,” according to the Yale Alumni Magazine, the Yale Center for British Art displays little self-awareness of its own complicity in what is essentially a marketing scheme, now laundered with Ivy League detergent.
Born in Croydon in 1963, Emin today controls an operation that supports studios in London and on the Côte d’Azur along with a thirty-thousand-square-foot painting factory in her coastal hometown of working-class Margate. Her art production has long outpaced her institutional acceptance. The YCBA may believe it has made a bold contemporary statement in mounting Emin’s first American museum show. Yet Emin is the greater beneficiary as her work receives the imprimatur she has long lacked. American audiences have always shown far less interest than English ones in her class-and-gender provocations. A famous British artist who has never quite captured the American consciousness—much like a pop band that cannot crack the U.S. airwaves—she now receives a prized stateside foothold. “It’s important, and it’s good for me, my first museum show in America, to be associated with such a strong educational platform,” Emin frankly states in an interview at the center. “Whatever they might have thought about me previously, they will have to rethink again, ’cause I’ve been invited here.”
Tracey Emin, From the Mountain to the Lake, 2022, Acrylic on canvas, Collection of the artist. © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2024.
It could be argued that Emin’s British notoriety alone now warrants a turn at the Yale Center for British Art. There are those who may find interest in her paintings, even if her celebrity presence does more to distract from her own aesthetic merits and that of the other artists on display than enhance them. With a poem by Emin included in a YCBA publication of Turner’s last sketchbook, efforts to align her work with Turner and their connection to Margate are tenuous at best and merely distort our understanding of a painter of two centuries previous.
Ultimately, it is the proximity of this contemporary artist and her commercial operation to the administration of an academic museum that is most alarming. We are informed that “I Loved You Until the Morning” has been “curated by Martina Droth, Paul Mellon Director, with Tracey Emin and her creative director, Harry Weller.” The involvement of Emin’s galleries—White Cube, Xavier Hufkens, and Galleria Lorcan O’Neill—goes on to receive its own mention in the exhibition catalogue.
There was a time when ceding institutional autonomy to an artist and her handlers, no matter the style, would have been an actionable offense. Clearly, times have changed. Droth treats Emin with all the professional neutrality of a celebrity crush. “Emin has been an active and generous partner in shaping the exhibition,” she boasts, “lending paintings that are precious to her.” Introducing Emin for a conversation at the center, Droth maintains that, “We are here to celebrate a truly amazing artist.” Calling her “one of the leading artistic voices of our time,” Droth in her catalogue essay concludes that Emin “has rewritten that script and put ‘Mad Tracey from Margate,’ as she has described herself, into art’s ‘f*cking epicenter.’”
Emin plays the fool. Meanwhile, the Yale Center for British Art has simply been played.
“Tracey Emin: I Loved You Until The Morning” opened at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, on March 29 and remains on view through August 10, 2025. ↩