I’m scared of heights. I’m scared of snakes. These were just two of the fears that Tracey Emin challenged when I spent three days alone with her on top of a French mountain.
The vertigo was first to go. We landed at Marseille after a civilised flight spent sipping white wine and talking about art and books. The black car that greeted us was, I assumed, a taxi to her house above Le Lavandou on the Cote d’Azur. Instead, it zipped round the corner to – gulp – the heliport, where we were strapped into a waiting chopper before I could say: “Tracey, I’m terrified of helicopters.” Thoughtfully, she sat me by the pilot so I could see everything below.
We hovered over a landscape of white rock and silver olives that had been painted by some of the giants of modern art. After we’d passed Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire, Tracey pointed to her orange-roofed house in a rambling, wild estate on the edge of a nature reserve. Given all this, I was expecting to be greeted by a team of servants, but once the helicopter buzzed away we were totally alone.
Tracey is self-sufficient here. She grows vegetables in a little valley where she has her studio, and cooks them in the cosy cottage kitchen of her half-chateau, half-hobbit-hole home. She potters about in the vast, semi-cultivated garden in gold sandals, writing letters, reading, drawing, painting. I told her she reminds me of Andy Warhol, by which I meant she’s a great pop artist. She replied, unexpectedly, that when I saw her life here I’d find she has more in common with Georgia O’Keeffe. And it’s true, she does.
When she showed me the guest cottage where I was to sleep, I instinctively closed the bedroom window, worried about what slithered about in the woods out there. The next morning, I woke up to find a big lizard crawling about. It kept returning. We became friends, to a degree. When I mentioned over breakfast that at least it wasn’t a snake, Tracey looked dark. “Oh,” she said, “there are snakes.”
The only time she actually joked about killing me, though, was when we went swimming at Le Lavandou. By now we’d been talking for a couple of days and food was running short. She drove us to the town, where we got groceries from a shop whose owners are very slowly teaching her French. Then we went to the beach. As we swam out towards the luxury yachts, she said this was the plan all along: to lure me to France, get me out to sea and drown me in revenge for bad reviews I’d written.
When she was shortlisted for the Turner prize in 1999, I was horrified that the infamy of My Bed seemed to be eclipsing what I saw then as more serious contemporary art. Now I think My Bed is one of the most enduring and poetic works of our time. I also think the drawings and paintings she’s always done alongside her conceptual works are powerful and expressive. She draws with the raw energy of Basquiat and the sensuality of Egon Schiele. Her nudes are explosions of sheer life.
Tracey may appal snobs who think they know a lot more about Proper Painting than they do, and perhaps you too, if you think it’s a sin to be rich. But my enthusiasm for her has given me the chance to get to know this extraordinary person. It started when she wrote out of the blue, inviting me to provide the introduction to a luxurious new picturebook of her art. She then suggested that, to get to understand her better, I go with her to Provence.
With all my fears, I can see the downside to living alone in this remote place, though obviously it does not occur to her to be scared of anything. She has a running battle with local hunters who pursue wild boars across her land. I don’t fancy their chances. Although, when a hornet got caught in the kitchen skylight, it was me who stood on a chair to ineffectively flail at it. She then told me about the time she arrived here to find a swarm of insects invading her bedroom, like some installation by Louise Bourgeois.
Books about her hero Bourgeois are on her coffee table, but she reads more widely than that. When I arrived she lent me her copy of F Scott Fitzgerald’s novella The Diamond as Big as the Ritz. She was reading his collected short stories. A house overlooking the Cote d’Azur is a great place to read Fitzgerald, who set Tender Is the Night in these parts. We also found we both adore Horse Crazy, Gary Indiana’s novel of love and madness in the New York art world. It’s no longer in print in Britain, but Tracey recently helped Indiana get his autobiography published in the US. That support for a writer friend is typical of the Tracey Emin I got to know. As we worked together, I was more and more impressed by her openness and generosity. I love her art, but what I love most about it is not necessarily what she intends people to fix on: the sheer sexiness of her nude drawings and paintings. For me, that is not a detraction. It is high praise. Art should be joyous. Why not? “No nude,” as the much-misunderstood art historian Kenneth Clark put it in the 1950s, “should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling”. Looking at her explicit drawings and paintings, it’s not so much a vestige as a tidal wave of passion that comes through. How could I ask her about this, alone on her mountain?
We got on well. We drank wine moderately, she cooked, and we covered everything from her love of Vermeer to her memories of the 1990s art scene. The reason she made, or rather kept, more money than some of her YBA contemporaries, she said, is that although she got a reputation for wild living – and created a permanent monument to it in My Bed – there was one thing she never blew her earnings on. She never touched drugs. When one friend came home enthusing about cocaine, that was it. She thinks coke wrecked the creativity of many of her generation.
So the fascinating stories went on, but it was only at breakfast on my very last morning there that I finally raised the subject of sex. Needless to say she explained her preferences and her desires in the same forthright way she says everything else. I still hadn’t really explained that I planned to write an essay almost entirely about art and sex and how she fits into the history of the nude. When I sent the finished piece, I wondered if she would be shocked or simply perplexed.
Her response was quick: “I just read it straight through. I love it. It’s so sexy, almost pornographic, hardcore.” I don’t think many other artists would have responded so imaginatively, or given me such freedom. So, my hardcore study of Tracey Emin and the history of the nude is launched this week, and I hope it does justice to a tremendous artist and a rare soul.
- Tracey Emin: Works 2007-2017 by Jonathan Jones is published by Rizzoli. The artist is in conversation with Jones at Tate Modern, London, on 5 October. Emin will be also be signing books at Frieze art fair on 5 October.
