“My bed is pretty luxurious nowadays,” says Tracey Emin, with a wry smile and a dry chuckle, launching her latest show at London’s groovy White Cube gallery. It’s 25 years since her notorious artwork, My Bed, was first shown at the Tate. A quarter of a century later, it still seems to follow her around.

My Bed caused a sensation when it was unveiled in 1999. Emin had spent four days alone in bed. When she finally emerged, her bed was strewn with the detritus of this depressive bender: empty vodka bottles, overflowing ashtrays, dirty underwear… At first, she wanted to paint a picture of it — but then she thought, why not just exhibit the actual bed? 

My Bed was a Succès de Scandale — the best or worst of modern art, depending on your point of view. Alongside Damien Hirst’s pickled shark, it became a byword for the sort of artistry which makes a lot of people very cross. Yet amid all the uproar and adulation, what most folk forgot was that in fact My Bed (subsequently sold by Christie’s for a cool £2,546,500 — nice work if you can get it) was a rather conventional, old-fashioned artwork — something that could quite easily have been done back in the 1970s by Joseph Beuys or one of his zany Fluxus pals. No matter. Emin briefly became a sort of avant-garde Spice Girl, one of the leading YBAs (Young British Artists, the artistic equivalent of Britpop). “I was caught up in that whirlwind,” she says, with a shudder. As a celebrity career move, it was priceless. For a serious artist, it was a curse.

Like every other aspect of Cool Britannia (Blur, Oasis, Tony Blair), the YBAs were suddenly very fashionable and then, just as suddenly, last year’s thing — but after the hullabaloo had died down, Emin did something much more interesting. She returned to her first love, figurative painting, which she’d pursued at art school and then forsaken. This show is its apotheosis, a range of impassioned pictures which feel far closer to modern masters like Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele than any of those trendy YBAs.

Emin’s brushwork is unruly, but her draughtsmanship is assured. Although her paint-splattered pictures are an affront if you like your art neat and tidy, their violent execution and explicit subject matter will be familiar to anyone who knows the German Expressionists of a century ago. Despite their superficial shock value, fundamentally these impulsive paintings are actually rather classical. Her favourite theme is the reclining nude.

Her pictures are intensely personal. On some of them, the best of them, she’s scrawled angry, grief-stricken missives — fragments of love letters to an absent wayward lover. “Like a fool I followed love to the end,” reads one of them. “Like the sad, haunted soul that I am, I followed you to the end.”

Whether you find this savage intimacy thrilling or suffocating is a matter of opinion — and often gender. “Being Miss Emin is her core activity,” complained the late, great art critic, Brian Sewell. “‘Look at me, look at me!’ she barks.” Sewell spoke for many men who find her introspection irritating, but I know a lot of women who find it exhilarating and inspiring. Like Louise Bourgeois, with whom she collaborated on a series of heartfelt artworks, she speaks to an aspect of the female psyche that most men can only guess at. I’ve always enjoyed her gutsy work, but I still feel like an outsider looking in.

The pain and anguish of romantic love has always been her compass, but during lockdown she was confronted with something even bigger when she was diagnosed with bladder cancer — the same disease that killed her mother. She could quite easily have died (“I’m so lucky — I shouldn’t be here”), yet ironically her near fatal illness has given her work a new lease of life. 

“I’m not scared of dying,” she says, and I believe her, but the realisation that life is finite has given her art a focus and an urgency it didn’t have before. In some of these nude self-portraits you can see the result of her urostomy, the plastic pipe that trails from her stoma like an umbilical cord. In another one, a woman lies bleeding. “I don’t want to have sex because my body feels dead,” reads the caption alongside it. She’s made art about rape and abortion, drawing on her own experiences. Now she’s one of cancer’s walking wounded, she’s making art about that too.

“Has anybody got a stoma here?” she asks the assembled hacks at this press view. No-one answers, and I realise how brave you’d have to be to put your hand up and say, in front of everyone, “Yes, I do.” That’s what these fearless artworks do. If I had a stoma, would I be reassured by her uncompromising paintings? Maybe not, but I think I’d be relieved to know I wasn’t the only one. “My stoma keeps me alive,” she says. “It’s what keeps me here.”

Last time I saw her, two years ago, I asked her if her revelatory art had cost her something — the way she’d sacrificed her privacy, the right to a secret inner life. “It’s cost me lots,” she told me then. “I’m not the luckiest in love. I don’t have children. I don’t have a family.” At the time, this made her cancer seem especially cruel, but now I feel she’s uniquely equipped to tackle it. It feels as if she’s spent the last 30 years preparing for this challenge, and now she’s been given the biggest subject — one that nobody would wish for, but which she can wrestle with best of all. “If cancer had to do that for me then that’s the way it was,” she says, sagely. “I’m so happy I didn’t die because I’ve achieved so much in the last few years, far more than I did before.”

TRACEY EMIN – I FOLLOWED YOU TO THE END

White Cube, London (www.whitecube.com)

From 19^th September to 10^th November 2024