Tracey Emin and Henry Miller: a perfect match

Her new covers for Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn restore some of the book’s messy truth, usually effaced by soft-focus glamour

It’s taken too long for Tracey Emin and Henry Miller to find each other. The artist has provided cover artwork for the new Penguin Modern Classics editions of Miller’s novels Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn. They are scribbles and Schiele-esque swirls, shadowy dark smudges of bodies in motion. They are perfect.

Emin has corrected a long-standing problem with the bodies that have graced the covers of these books. I never objected to their nakedness per se – there are a lot of naked ladies on the inside, so it seems only natural they should appear on the outside too. What seemed wrong was their pertness, their perfection. The specifics may have changed, as one edition replaced another, but the bodies remained the same: so soft focus, so 1930s erotica in nostalgic black and white. Miller introduces Tropic of Cancer by saying: “This is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty … ” So to represent the book with a beautiful, unsullied (usually headless) young woman with a perfect body was always a fundamental mismatch.

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