In the 1880s the young Max Klinger made a series of etchings detailing the surreal adventures of a woman’s glove picked up by a stranger at an ice rink. At a certain point the glove washes up, nightmarishly large, beside a sleeping man’s bed on to which a shipwrecked sailor is desperately hauling himself. Storm-tossed billows merge with rumpled pillows in an image simply titled ‘Angste’.
Klinger’s nightmare vision came back to haunt me at the exhibition Tracey Emin, ‘My Bed’/JMW Turner. Yes, you read that right. Since its loan to the Tate in 2015, Emin’s most famous oeuvre has been partnered in exhibitions with the work of Francis Bacon at Tate Britain and William Blake at Tate Liverpool. Now it’s the turn of JMW Turner at Turner Contemporary Margate — and, astonishingly, the partnership works.
This is largely down to Emin’s intervention in the choice of paintings.
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