Courtesy the artist, White Cube, and Lehmann Maupin Gallery

Tracey Emin's “Everyone I have Ever Slept With (1963–95)” (1995)

Tracey Emin When in… London To Bling or Not to Bling? Tracey Emin Is Giving Up on Sex Chapmans to Re-create Emin’s Tent Art Checks In Being Cindy Sherman’s Boyfriend East Is East

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

The British art-world enfant terrible said she had been contacted by Saatchi Gallery after the fire in East London, which ruined about 100 works by artists also including Damien Hirst and Jake and Dinos Chapman, and offered £1 million ($1.96 million), the amount of the insurance payout, to make a copy of the work.

“To recreate it would have been morally wrong," said Emin, who admitted she was upset by the offer. "It wouldn't have that emotional input to it."

A tent with 102 names sewn into its sides, the work was not just a laundry list of her lovers, said Emin; it also included names given to her aborted fetuses as well as those of relatives she had slept with as a child. “It was really sweet, it smelt nice, it was cozy. It wasn't simply the names of everyone I'd ever slept with. It was about intimacy.”

Emin's retrospective is on view at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art through November 9.