“Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.”—Carl Jung
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At the Yale Center for British Art, which reopened in spring after a two-year renovation, the art is not only a product of fantasy but also, usually, a fantastic producer of it.
I had barely arrived at In a New Light: Five Centuries of British Art, which occupies the Center’s entire top floor, before a beguiling painting, The Island of Barbados (ca. 1694), had me fantasizing about a swashbuckling adventure. Impressively rendered from an imagined bird’s-eye view, the painting attributed to Isaac Sailmaker shows the island from one side, where a central scene of galleon ships visiting an old-world port had put my mind to sea. Little did I know, until I read a nearby placard, that the work conveys a much uglier and truer fantasy: a dream of prosperity via the export of sugar, pursued at the expense of the people enslaved to produce it. This revelation prompted other, more sober imaginings for me, about the conditions of their toil and humankind’s capacity for rationalizing moral corruption.
Wandering a bit, I homed in on a 1778 portrait of Sarah Campbell (pictured at top), an aristocrat I imagine would do well today on TikTok or Instagram. Portrayed in a manner that feels carefully carefree, she looks away from the viewer, as if somehow forgetting she’s signed up to sit the long hours for a portrait. It’s no fantasy that all portraits at the time were an exercise in image-crafting, but the trick, much as it is today, was to make it look like you weren’t trying too hard.
Back to a landscape, Alexander Nasmyth’s View of the City of Edinburgh (ca. 1822) offers more than one view, evoking both the nostalgic fantasy of pastoral knowing and the progressive fantasy of urban enlightenment. In the foreground of the painting, country folk seem content along a winding river’s bucolic banks. In the distance, the city is on the march, shaping its own horizon with artistic stone towers and a clifftop keep. I could imagine, if forced to choose, going either way, though, either way, I’d miss modern comforts.
One floor below, works in a special exhibition, J. M. W. Turner: Romance and Reality, which ends this Sunday, demonstrate how technique, not subject matter, can create a sense of fantasy that’s more felt than imagined (and all the more real for it). A landscape painter in pursuit of more “expressive ends” than his forebears and contemporaries, Turner, who died in 1851 but remains “possibly the most widely admired and influential British artist of all time,” developed a “unique approach… that combined virtuoso brushwork with brilliant color, dazzling light effects, and an almost abstract sensibility,” writes curator Lucinda Lax.
In one painting, a watercolor titled Vesuvius in Eruption (ca. 1818-20), a geyser of lava larger than its own volcano fills a hellish red sky with splattering white heat. The sea below is an underexposed mirror, swallowing the light. On the shore, people run or cower, scaled to little more than specks. I could feel their smallness and terror almost as if they were my own.
Leaning even further into his signature expressive style, another, later painting, Wreckers—Coast of Northumberland, with a Steam-Boat Assisting a Ship off Shore (1834), depicts a fascinating phenomenon: people—called wreckers—who would “gather on the shore” after a boat had begun to sink “in the hope of scavenging the cargo” that might wash ashore. I’m curious about the backstories of those people, and yet when I look at Turner’s painting, my mind is swept into the action and atmosphere that suddenly feel visceral and immediate: tall waves crashing across a blurry shoreline, sea spittle spraying high into the air, a sky badly bruised by a gathering storm and ghostly figures planting their wispy legs in the sand trying to heave their spoils out of the drink.
One floor below that, things feel very different. The fantasy inherent to the Center’s third and final reopening show, Tracey Emin: I Loved You Until The Morning—the famed British artist’s first museum exhibition in America—lies primarily in the mind of the artist, whose tortured renderings of herself, often nude and, somehow, both graphic and abstract, seem catalyzed by a series of unfulfilled beliefs: schisms between her expectations for reality and reality itself.
In I Followed you to the end (2024), Emin paints, against a field of blood red, a kind of horror-movie torso in black silhouette, with a white negative space flowing down like a wedding dress. Across its invisible silk and lace, she writes a stream-of-consciousness letter to ex-lovers who “made me feel so alone.” In I never Asked to Fall in Love—You made me Feel like this (2018), a woman in red is barely discernible against a slightly lighter red, perhaps lying down on a bed. Bloody drips at different stages of drying flow off opposite ends of the canvas. In Dreaming of Another World (2022), a nude woman—a young Emin—stands in a narrow doorway, perhaps embodying a portal between that dream world and the real one.
A video posted by the Center suggests Emin has recently found a measure of peace. “... [I]t’s about being on the wrong side of love. And how it hurts,” the artist says, speaking about Followed. “And now I think I’ve come through all of that. My life is less lonely, less solitary, but more conducive and more profound now. I feel more content now than ever I have.”
She doesn’t tell us why that is, but perhaps we can try to use our imaginations.
Written and photographed by Dan Mims.
