Dame Tracey Emin says male artists peak in their forties, but women have the ability to create powerful works for their entire lives.
The Turner Prize nominee, 61, made the observation on The Louis Theroux Podcast, describing her contemporary Damien Hirst, 59, as a man who was a force when he was young but not anymore.
Dame Tracey and Hirst have both been Turner prize nominees, with Hirst winning the prestigious award in 1995, with his formaldehyde-preserved cow and calf, called Mother and Child, Divided, the focal piece of his exhibition that year.
“Damien was a young artist that started off with a lot of that belief and a lot of that conviction. He was like a force. And now he’s not,” Dame Tracey said.
Men “sort of peak in their forties”, while “women just tend to come and come and come and come and come, so as a woman, you carry on coming all your life until you’re old”, she added.
Dame Tracey is best known for her works Everyone I have Ever Slept With (1995) and My Bed (1993), both of which caused much controversy at the time.
Dame Tracey, who earlier this year spoke with Geordie Greig, editor-in-chief of The Independent, about her cancer diagnosis, told Theroux: “I think it’s really hard to be an artist. I think it’s really difficult. I think people who don’t make art or don’t attempt to be an artist, don’t understand how difficult it is to have that conviction, that self-belief and everything.”
In a bid to illustrate her point that women can continue to create notable works into later life, she referred to Louise Bourgeois, a French artist best known for her large-scale sculpture work.
She continued to produce new pieces until her death at the age of 98 in 2010.
Dame Tracey said: “Like now, if you look [at the painter] Joan Mitchell, for example, she’s like undoubtedly one of the greatest American abstract painters ever, better than Jackson Pollock.”
Dame Tracey was recently honoured for her decades-long contribution to British art on the King’s birthday honours list.
Reacting to the honour, she said that she likes the “pomp and ceremony of the royal family” and believes they should be celebrated by a larger portion of the British public.
She added: “I would never, ever, ever want or wish to be part of the royal family, when you see what they have to do and how they live and how restricted their lives are, I think it’s like a kind of living hell.”
She then touched upon her own brush with mortality, which began while she was painting a large, abstract malignant tumour. While paiting it she is said to have discovered a tumour of her own and was subsequently diagnosed with bladder cancer in 2020.
The artist had to have extensive surgery as a result and has since used the experience to inspire several works, including a series of nude self-portraits, which were featured in the show A Journey To Death.
She has spoken openly about acquiring a stoma bag from the surgery and said she brought it in a Victoria Beckham-designed bag when she became a dame.
Explaining her reasoning, Dame Tracey said: “The reason why I had to have my night bag plugged in and my shopping bag when we met the King is because these things take time and you don’t know how long it’s going to take for them to come down the stairs and the last thing I want to do is be standing there ready to meet the King and Queen and then have to beforehand rush to the loo or my bag burst.
“That would be really embarrassing.”