“Romance and Reality” is the name the Yale Center for British Art has given to the J. M. W. Turner survey that co-inaugurates its luminous, long-anticipated renovation. The title is an apt, if sort of obvious, introduction to Turner, who has been hailed as the forerunner to modern art.
When people appear in the more than 75 prints and paintings on view at this museum in New Haven, Connecticut, they are specks against eldritch seas and green vistas. In one mighty watercolor of Mount Vesuvius, the protagonist drinks in the white-hot eruption as others flee, even if it promises ruin.
One floor away at the museum, Turner’s Romantic visions meet a different romance of a different flavor in a Tracey Emin show. The name of Emin’s show is “I Loved You Until the Morning,” and the paintings and sculptures present her body in relation to those capable of dealing it vast emotional damage. There are works depicting her ex-lover as a bloody abstraction pouring into her loins. Emin herself is represented often as a frenzy of breasts and legs, with a brown smear on her waist meant to depict a urostomy bag, her on-site studio collaborator told the press. Emin’s late mother is the subject of the show’s subtlest and best works. She appears as thick fog passing through the artist; which is to say, a memory.
J. M. W. Turner, Vesuvius in Eruption, (1817-1820).
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
The Yale Center for British Art has been closed since 2023 and will reopen on March 29. It’s undergone a tasteful renovation: the lighting was refreshed but aesthetically unchanged, and the rehang of the permanent collection now tells a story of British imperialism that tries to affords its victims dignity. This museum has always had an exceptional grasp on how reality and romance form memories, and how memories become self-mythologies that shape history when wielded on an epic scale.
Its stunning collection spans five centuries of British art of state portraits, aggrandizing likenesses, provincial scenes and landscapes, with contemporary pieces strategically scattered throughout. Within the galleries, for example, there’s an early portrait of a breastfeeding noblewoman installed near a large 2019 Cecily Brown abstraction of cavorting horses and hounds.
The highlight of the floor, for me, apart from the salon-style hallway, was Francis Harwood’s Bust of a Man (ca. 1758), a black limestone likeness of an enslaved man, a rarity for the time given the subject and material. Credit to the curators is due: They moved away bust from the wall to the center of the room, where it’s posed as if gazing at a scene of laborers in London. This installation exposes the rough, concave interior of the sculpture, where Harwood’s hand was evident.
It’s not always the case in British collecting institutions, but the Yale curators recognize these mythologies for what they are—this is no nostalgic homage to a bygone empire, and the wall texts have been rewritten accordingly. Colonialism is more explicitly highlighted, and instead of playing up an artist’s nationality or race, captions now emphasize the regions where artists were active.
Much of the permanent display proceeds chronologically, with sharp, well-placed allusions to British mercantile history and its involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. Edward Lear’s monumental painting Kangchenjunga from Darjeeling (1812) is a depiction of the Himalayan path frequented by Buddhist tea pickers. It’s breathtaking in scale and detail, and faces a William Daniell painting that depicts tea cultivation in China. The building has a symmetrical layout and an open interior punctuated with wide windows, so wherever one walks in the galleries, they can see where they’ve been.
A view of the galleries at the Yale Center for British Art, opening March 29.
Richard Caspole
The director of the Yale Center for British Art, Martina Droth, spoke at the press preview of an “empathetic resonance” between the collection and its building, which was designed by the Estonian-born American architect Louis I. Kahn, and opened to the public in 1977, three years after his death. (Across Chapel Street, the historic corridor of commerce in New Haven, there’s Kahn’s first major commission, the Yale University Art Gallery.) Kahn’s original halogen lighting system was replaced by climate-friendly LEDs. Additionally, his acrylic domed skylights have been replaced with sturdier material that retains Kahn’s honeycomb design. His central staircase is contained in a concrete silo where inside, refracting sunlight ripples across the walls.
I recommend returning to the Turner and Emin show for a second look after viewing the collection spaces. The show by Emin, a newly bestowed Dame in England, hits harder after spending time with the works by Mary Beale and Issac Sailmaker, whose paintings of a woman with a nearly naked bosom and the occupation of Barbados, respectively, exemplify the tension between the crown and the people’s evolving social consciousness.
The century or so prior to Turner was a tumultuous time, after all. The English Renaissance’s great questioners, Bacon and Hobbes and their peers, encouraged an existential questing. These notions of nonconformity antagonized directly by various religious leaders, while the Civil War (1642–51) irreparably shook the British monolith. Not that the Center’s galleries are a parade of avant-garde sculpture and abstraction; that’s for later. Based on this telling, the renovation of English sensibility unfolded in a subtle but steady fashion, much like the majesty of Kahn’s architecture.
Cecily Brown, The Hound with the Horses Hooves (2019).
Yale Center for British Art
The rehang is loosely thematic: In the Salon-style corridor hold groupings of dogs and horses, religious iconography (the best by William Blake, who will be the star of a solo show later), among more. The greatest curatorial challenge of this rehang was likely the area dedicated to the Center’s benefactors, many of whom had a hand in slavery or mercantile routes. Salons lack wall text by design, so the context is largely online. Hopefully the Center provides immediately accessible text, at least for the portrait of the Center’s primary patron, Paul Mellon, which includes imagery of enslaved children. The institution said it will update at least this area periodically, and the special exhibitions offer a glimpse into how its curators may steer the conversation forward.
Once an enfant terrible, Emin was known during the ’90s for sculptures and performances that explored the emotional toll of erotic encounters. This show places an emphasis on her understudied painting practice, which most recently centers the psychic unrest exacerbated by a diagnosis of bladder cancer in 2020. The show isn’t a survey, more like a catch-up, and is billed as her first institutional outing in North America. Some canvases are bittersweet—works about the death of her mother, remembrances of pleasure—others, enraged. Sexual violence is not depicted, but its specter speaks through the quivering silhouettes and vicious streaks and splatters of paint.
Though separated by more than a century, Emin and Turner are united, in part, by geography: both spent time in Margate, the coastal town where Turner worked during the 1830s and where Emin was raised during the 1960s and ’70s. In Margate, Turner experimented with materials like cloth, knives, and even bread to create the mottled topography of his paintings. The show spans more than 30 years, encompassing his entire artistic arc, and it features some rarities, including prints that he annotated, offering a rundown of the process he used to make them (if one can read his handwriting).
Maybe so much Turner seems syrupy to his detractors. Couldn’t be me; there’s liberation in being made small by indifferent expanses. That’s what Turner and Emin both understand: to be in awe is an act of submission. Staffa, Fingal’s Cave (ca. 1831–32), my favorite Turner on view, features roiling waves that break in roughly the center of the canvas. This directs the viewer’s gaze toward an unforgiving horizon, though just beyond its edge—daybreak.
