I’m currently on a trip to the UK, and while in London I managed to pack in an art double-header: in the morning, the Tracey Emin retrospective at the Tate (Tracey Emin: A Second Life). And in the afternoon, I saw the work of the Baroque Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbarán at the National Gallery. As pairings go, on the surface it seems somewhat disparate, but there are connections that thread them together. 

I have long been familiar with both artists, though through different routes and for different reasons. 

If you were interested in art in early 2000s London, there was no escaping Tracey Emin’s work — or her life. The tabloids latched on to her hedonistic nights, while the art establishment began to embrace her work. She was her shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1999 and the exhibition of My Bed triggered the inevitable ‘yes, but is it art?’ national conversation. The personal nature of her work made her a talking point for years. I was finally able to see that bed in this retrospective, and it was a poignant reminder of the chaos of life in the early 2000s and of being a young woman out in the world.

Zurburán — whose heyday was the mid-1600s — I encountered in the cool, quiet galleries of the Museo de Bellas Artes in Seville when I was living there as a PhD student. I was instantly struck by the dark, dramatic backgrounds that many of his paintings have, lending them what we would now consider a cinematic quality. While this style was not unique to works in this era (see Caravaggio) he seemed to capture something more otherworldly than his contemporaries. Like many painters of this time, Zurburán’s work is heavy on the religious imagery, which was no great surprise seeing as he was painting in Spain in the aftermath of the Counter-Reformation, when devotional art was used in Catholic nations help bolster the faith. 

The 17^th century was also the moment of Spain’s peak imperial prowess, and the Seville of Zurbarán’s time was one of a bustling port city — the richest in Europe — where he lived for much of his working life. It was an obvious place to earn commissions and patrons, but it was also one where a painter would have seen the great treasures of empire as the annual fleets arrived. At the same time, he surely had been of aware of its more destructive side, not least Spain’s participation in trans-Atlantic slavery. Enslaved people and black people were part of the Seville’s diverse and growing population in the 17^th century. I write a little about slavery in Spain and Portugal in this period in The Great Resistance, and it’s a time and place that continues to be of interest to me. It was actually this theme that led me to the Zurbarán exhibition, and I had planned to focus on that in this essay.

Instead, however, I was drawn to the women in the exhibition. Not least, the Virgin Mary, of whom there are many depictions. For instance, her limpid eyes gaze upwards in The Immaculate Conception with Two Boys Praying (pictured right). However, in Zurburán’s striking The Virgin of the Carthusians (pictured below), he presents a somewhat different Mary. This is one of my favourite religious paintings, for the unusual composition. Here Mary stands in a powerful pose, her hands touching the heads of the monks who kneel next to her while angels drape her blue cape over them. It is supposed to symbolise her protection of the Carthusian order, but it also reveals her power over the men who remained devoted to her. 

Perhaps having seen the Emin exhibition in the morning left me more tuned into a feminist frequency, and I spent much of the subsequent days mulling over the place of women: who we were and are, in art, as subjects of art, and in the world more generally. It sounds basic, and perhaps it is, but both exhibitions remained on my mind. 

Zurburán, like many Spanish artists of this time, mostly depicted woman as Madonnas, virginal saints, and Biblical figures. Some three centuries later, one of Britain’s most famous living female artists is able to display work about her sexuality, her abortions, her operations, and her body more generally. More than 300 years is a long time, except that it isn’t. We’ve come a long way, and sometimes, it feels, very little way at all.

I’m no art historian. I’m also on the road (more on this below) and writing this in the few short bursts of time available to me, so this is no great analysis. Just the observation that time has truly brought changes with it for women, and yet many continue to find themselves stuck in that place, swinging between Madonnas and Whores (or should that be Tradwives and Cat Ladies?!), when the reality of women’s lives has never been so easily divided. 

It was best summed up with perhaps the most moving part of the Emin retrospective, the 1995 video installation Why I Never Became a Dancer.

In it, she narrates her attempts to leave the depressed English seaside town of Margate, where she grew up. She entered a dancing competition, with the prize being a trip to London. Just at the point where she had victory in her sights, she heard a group of men — many of whom she previously had sex with — began to shout. She recalled in the work:

 ‘And as I started to dance, people started to clap. I was going to win and then I was out of here.

Nothing could stop me. And then they started. SLAG SLAG SLAG.’

This ruptured her momentum, and she lost the contest. She went to London anyway. 

Years later, Emin has her final say through this piece. In the last shot of the video (pictured right), the song “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” by Sylvester comes on, and she starts dancing in an empty studio. In the voiceover, she says to the men she had earlier slept with and who shouted at her: ‘Shane, Eddy, Tony, Doug, Richard … This one’s for you.’

It’s a powerful repudiation, not only to the boys who were there that night but to all the men who have consistently found ways to tear women down just as they are trying to climb to somewhere higher. It’s also a rejection, in a way, of a world that has long demanded women be Madonnas or whores, rather than just being what we are, which is mighty and real. 

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What I’m …. doing

Travelling, speaking, thinking. I’ve just been at the Chalke History festival, where I gave a couple of talks. The festival is in the middle of Wiltshire and it was my first time here. It is an absolute delight, and one I would highly recommend for any UK-based (or visiting!) readers who want what is, essentially, Glastonbury (or Coachella) for History-Lovers. It’s every year in June – and this year truly was a scorcher. The heat was positively un-British. The talks will appear on the Chalke History Hub, but in the meantime you can hear or watch me give a special pre-festival interview on the podcast History with Jackson.

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