He shot the YBAs boozing, canoodling – and shaking up the art scene. Now the photographer has found inspiration in some other unruly characters: his lurchers. We join him for walkies in rural Suffolk

‘Finn! Finn! FINN!” Johnnie Shand Kydd is having trouble keeping his inquisitive lurcher in sight. Finn may be an incredibly sweet-natured dog but he’s hard of hearing – and has previous for disappearing on this particular walk.

At least the photographer has experience in dealing with unruly characters. In the 1990s, he found himself embedded with the Young British Artists, granted free rein to shoot the hedonistic, chaotic and wildly creative art scene that birthed Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and more. Shot in black and white, these images upended the convention for artists posing in their studios, easels in hand. “I just wasn’t interested in that at all,” says Shand Kydd. Instead, his photographs capture Hirst balancing a tower of hats on his head, Emin in a rubber dinghy with Georgina Starr, a newly pregnant Sam Taylor-Johnson (then Taylor-Wood) and a whole load of partying, boozing and canoodling.

From a landmark Tracey Emin show at Tate Modern to the first female painter in the Royal Academy’s main space, the art world is finally catching up

“Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?” the feminist art collective Guerrilla Girls asked in their famous 1989 poster. It pointed out that fewer than 5% of the artists in the modern art sections were women, but 85% of the nudes were female. They could have asked the same question of any major art gallery in the world. Four decades later, this year’s biggest UK exhibitions finally show a different picture.

Dame Tracey Emin might be naked in many of her self-portraits, but that isn’t what got her into Tate Modern for a landmark retrospective. Rose Wylie, 91, is the first female painter to have a solo exhibition at the Royal Academy. The Colombian artist Beatriz González (who died, aged 93, in January) is at the Barbican. And that is just this week’s openings.

An evening with Tracey Emin: Live from Tate Modern
On Friday 24 April join Tracey Emin as she takes us on a journey into her life in art, with Charlotte Higgins. Online only.
Book tickets here

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Tate Modern, London
Forget the sex and drugs of the 90s. This wildly emotional exhibition shows that Emin’s life’s work has been turning suffering into sculpture, insults into poetry – and agony into art

It feels as if you’re intruding. Walking into Tate Modern’s huge Tracey Emin retrospective is like walking in on her crying, naked, sobbing and snotty, as if you have stumbled into something painfully private.

That’s not an easy thing to pull off in the cavernous spaces of our leading contemporary art institution, but that’s what makes Tracey – it doesn’t feel right calling her Emin, she pulls you so close it’s like you know her, it’s Tracey isn’t it? – such a special, important, era-defining artist.

She scandalised the art world in the 1990s with her unmade bed, partied hard in the 2000s – then a brush with death turned the artist’s life upside down. Now she’s as frank as ever

There is a long buildup before I get to see Tracey Emin – her two cats, Teacup and Pancake, preceding her like a pair of slinky sentries as she walks into the white-painted basement kitchen of her huge Georgian house in Margate. The lengthy overture is because – though I’ve been invited for noon – Emin is a magnificently late riser. Her average working day, her studio manager Harry tells me, runs from about 6pm to 3am. And so, while the artist is gradually sorting herself out, Harry takes me on a tour through her home town in the January drizzle, the sea a sulky grey blur beyond the sands.

At last, Harry is ringing the doorbell, and Emin’s lovely housekeeper, Sam, is sitting me down in the kitchen, then finally here she is, dressed in loose dark trousers and top, with those faithful cats. Emin is recognisably the same as she’s ever been – the artist who scandalised and entranced the nation in the 1990s with her tent embroidered with the names of everyone she’d ever slept with; with her unmade bed and its rumpled sheets and detritus. She still has that sardonic lip, those arched brows, those flashing eyes. But these days she is surprisingly calm, slow moving, her greying hair swept back into a loose bun. This is the Emin who has worked hard, survived a great deal and, somewhat unpredictably, ended up a national treasure.

From Yoko Ono to Frida Kahlo, from Louise Bourgeois to Artemisia Gentileschi, women have long been capturing the unvarnished truth about their own bodies – and that’s why my novel Female, Nude weaves them into the plot

‘If you want to paint, put your clothes back on!” That was how Carolee Schneemann summarised the critical response to her 1975 performance piece Interior Scroll, which she had performed nude standing on a gallery table. After making a series of life model poses, she removed a scroll from her vagina and began to read her manifesto. In doing so, Schneemann asked an important question: “What does it mean for a female artist to be both the artist and the life model?” Or as she put it: “Both image and image-maker?”

The female nude, as depicted and objectified by the male artist, has dominated western art for centuries. Despite decades of feminist efforts, that interaction between the great male genius and his female model – sometimes muse – remains a subject of perennial fascination. To enter a gallery, or to open a university textbook, is to be confronted with a parade of idealised naked females by male artists from Rubens, Titian and Botticelli to Picasso and De Kooning.

Madonna labelled it ‘heaven’ on a recent visit, but the cost of living in the seaside resort is hitting many residents hard

Not many chefs working in small, family-run restaurants expect global megastars to turn up for dinner and to design them a menu from scratch.

But that’s what happened to Simona Di Dio last weekend, when she cooked dishes inspired by her Italian grandmother’s recipes for Madonna, who sat on the single wooden dining table in Di Dio’s cosy, candlelit Italian restaurant in Margate’s old town.

Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate
Munch, Bourgeois, Gormley and Baselitz go shoulder to shoulder with up-and-coming artists in an exhibition that revels in its stygian gloom

Tracey Emin catches me looking from her self-portrait to her as I try to assess the closeness of the resemblance. Not that close. This inky screenprint is bigger than she is, its face wider and taller. But it’s not a picture of the outer person but an inner vision. As we stand in front of it I seem to fall into radiating pools of blackness – to cross into darkness.

Emin has curated an exhibition for the depths of winter. It’s a generous, unexpected show with an eclectic yet profound openness to kinds of creativity many might think incompatible: paintings, installations, performance art all face the night here. She sets artists she nurtures at the Emin Studios alongside her heroes Edvard Munch, Louise Bourgeois and other luminaries of modern art – if luminary is the right word in this stygian setting. For, by a stroke of lighting genius, the Carl Freedman Gallery has been plunged into nocturnal shadow that still lets you see the art.