Tracey Emin/Edvard Munch at the Royal Academy review: raw emotion will knock your socks off

Tracey Emin gets a lot of stick for being “self-obsessed”. In her work she mines her own experience, her own insecurity, her own trauma. How undignified! How crude! Nobody ever seems to criticise Edvard Munch for doing pretty much the same thing. Odd, that.

Munch is a hero to Emin, and a soulmate. They share a rawness, an honesty, and a depth of turmoil that can leave you breathless. Describing her first encounter with The Scream, Emin, who had spent the previous days crying, “wanted to jump inside the picture and cradle The Scream in my arms. Another lost soul.”

She and the exhibition’s curator, Kari J Brandtzaeg, delved deep into the collections of the Munch Museum in Oslo to choose works by the Norwegian painter to hang alongside Emin’s own in these three rooms. The exhibition’s dominant theme is “spiritual loneliness” and it is deeply personal, not just in Emin’s often distressingly intimate paintings but also in her choice of Munch’s. These are the pictures that speak to her, of her own experience.

Sometimes that’s a bit puzzling for viewers most familiar with the iconic Scream — only one of the Munch paintings here could be interpreted as a self-portrait, his The Death of Marat, 1907. The central figure bears a striking resemblance to the painter and the woman representing Charlotte Corday looks a lot like his former lover Tulla Larsen (who may or may not have shot him in the hand, but whatever happened it was a lovers’ tiff that ended badly). Most of the Munch pictures here are images of female models, shifting us by one remove from the artist’s own anguish.

There is clearly a painterly influence. You start to notice that Munch allows his paint to drip, not as much, but the way Emin does, keen to get the image down, not caring so much about boring things like perfection — and the way the show is hung sometimes makes it look as though her compositions are directly influenced by his: I came here For you, 2018 is like an echo of Model by the Wicker Chair, 1919-21. Emin, I suspect, would rather we noticed the emotional connection, however.

My only issue is that Munch’s cries can’t always be heard over the fierce yowls of Emin’s works. Most of these are from the last seven years — and this is the rawest she’s ever been, after years of working through trauma to the point that she feels emotionally strong enough to allow it all out onto the canvas unfiltered by fear that it might break her (it’s cruelly ironic that this should coincide with a collapse in her physical health — earlier this year she had major surgery for bladder cancer). I found the sheer heart-stopping clamour of her paintings almost too much for Munch’s quieter anguish.

There is something magnificent about that, but my God, it’s a lot.

From December 7 to February 28 (royalacademy.org.uk)