Doors of the re-vamped national Portrait Gallery.
www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/jun/21/doors-tracey-emin-national-portrait-gallerys-41m-rebirth
Pix and comments on changes in the National Portrait Gallery.
Slashed stone, daylight galore and doors by Tracey Emin: the National Portrait Gallery’s £41m rebirth
Forty-five faces of women, scribbled by Emin, now beam out from bronze doors – all part of an astonishing revamp that has turned this once unloved London landmark into a great building
“‘A foil to the row of 14 white male painters who look down, stony-faced, from above’ … Emin’s doors featuring 45 portraits that ‘represent every woman’
National Portrait Gallery
For me, its a total “like” - women of all ages and cultural backgrounds under the original Great Artists at a time when women were predominantly not just the muse or object of art, but beauty defined as young.
My big grump is of course the London-centric placing- I hope tho to find more close ups of the panels.
My other big grump of course is that Emin drew on the work of some of us producing alternative and controversial images of women in the 1970’s that didn’t match the stereotypes but she hasn’t ever acknowledged this body of work - nor the work of women like Käthe Kollwitz earlier in the century - but things are what they are and glad to see this work, and anyway artists have always drawn on a history of art and worked within it.
www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/jun/21/doors-tracey-emin-national-portrait-gallerys-41m-rebirth
Pix and comments on changes in the National Portrait Gallery.
Slashed stone, daylight galore and doors by Tracey Emin: the National Portrait Gallery’s £41m rebirth
Forty-five faces of women, scribbled by Emin, now beam out from bronze doors – all part of an astonishing revamp that has turned this once unloved London landmark into a great building
“‘A foil to the row of 14 white male painters who look down, stony-faced, from above’ … Emin’s doors featuring 45 portraits that ‘represent every woman’
National Portrait Gallery
For me, its a total “like” - women of all ages and cultural backgrounds under the original Great Artists at a time when women were predominantly not just the muse or object of art, but beauty defined as young.
My big grump is of course the London-centric placing- I hope tho to find more close ups of the panels.
My other big grump of course is that Emin drew on the work of some of us producing alternative and controversial images of women in the 1970’s that didn’t match the stereotypes but she hasn’t ever acknowledged this body of work - but things are what they are and glad to see this work, and anyway artists have always drawn on a history of art and worked within it.
Pix - official opening of new gallery
Pix by Kathy Kollwitz
1970's by Judy Chicago
That would have needed the work of another more conventional and less radical artist than Emin. To my mind, Emin’s work celebrates the essence of womanhood, in both its shared experience and its diversity, not by the careers that may define them
I’m also less happy about the idea that women’s careers somehow define them.
The self portrait by Käthe Kollwitz , her achingly beautiful Pietà (Dead mother and son) which must have reflected tens or hundreds of thousands of women like her whose sons had died in the First World War or her moving Mother and Newborn say much more about womanhood to me. I think Emin makes more than a nod in that direction by depicting “ordinary” women not the Great and the Good one expects to see at the NPG
Her work has been described as
a riposte to the roundels on the rest of the facade that are filled with age-old images of prominent men
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