J.M.W. Turner
Dallas Museum of Art, February 10-May 18, 2008
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, July 1-September 21, 2008
“So I am to become a nonentity, am I?” These words, attributed to the 76-year-old Joseph Mallord William Turner on his deathbed, offer a revelatory insight into the boiling ambition that fueled his long and controversial career. For over six decades, this lowborn painter worked furiously to establish and sustain his reputation as the greatest painter in Britain. As one walks through the 12 rooms of this stupendous exhibit, currently at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the largest ever in North America, one recognizes an artist whose imaginative vision and innovative techniques of light and color expanded artistic possibilities in the 19th century. Turner also had a remarkable “second life” in the mid-20th century when his late unfinished works were rediscovered in the heyday of the Abstract Expressionists, as well as by a host of experimental filmmakers.
J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) was an unlikely candidate for the title of the greatest British painter of his age. His father was a barber and wigmaker who showed his precocious son’s drawings in the window of his shop in Covent Garden. Soon after enrolling as a student at the Royal Academy in 1790, Turner recognized that garnering attention at the Academy’s annual exhibition was a necessity if he was to rise from the ranks. From then on his ambition was inextricably bound up with the Academy’s professed aim of developing a uniquely British school of painting. By 1802, at the age of 26, he was elected a full Royal Academician–the youngest member ever so admitted.
Five years after this honor, Turner sought out another: He became professor of perspective, in which capacity he delivered a course of lectures in most years during 1811-1828. The uneducated but intellectually curious Turner took pains to present his innovative ideas visually in diagrams. He retained a lifelong devotion to the Royal Academy, describing it at one point as the “institution to which I owe everything.”
Although Turner first attained distinction with his precise architectural watercolors depicting the melancholy ruins of grand Gothic abbeys in all their “picturesque” variety, he knew that he must master the more traditional art of oil painting if he was to be taken seriously. This meant accepting the Academy’s hierarchy of genres. History painting, with its resonant stories based on the Bible or such ancient writers as Homer and Virgil, was considered the most demanding art form both for the skills required and for the elevated moral teachings offered.
As we can see in the early rooms of the exhibit, Turner was amazingly quick to assimilate the lessons of the old masters Claude Lorraine and the Dutch marine painters, and to learn from (and outshine) his contemporaries such as John Constable. Nevertheless, he bristled at the Academy’s denigration of landscape as a “mere” reproduction of appearances. His strategy was to imbue his canvases with heroic literary references and atmospheric effects that created their own sense of drama.
An early example, Dolbadern Castle, North Wales (1800), reveals a theatrically backlit castle set high up on a dark rocky terrain. In the bottom foreground, dwarfed by the mountain scenery above, we see two soldiers with a bound and kneeling prisoner who represents the 13th-century Welsh prince imprisoned in the castle by his brother. To make the landscape speak to the themes of liberty and servitude, Turner appended several lines of verse (possibly by himself) to the exhibit catalogue.
During the first decade of the 19th century, Turner attained his status as a leading member of the British school by painting thrilling and even terrifying scenes of nature’s overwhelming force and grandeur. Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) had popularized the notion that such awesome and exhilarating scenes, when viewed from a safe distance, can lead to reflections on man’s insignificance in the face of a vast and indifferent universe. Turner’s churning seas and thunderous skies gave thrilling visual form to the Sublime as Burke interpreted it.
The grand rhetorical language of the Sublime, in turn, became a key aspect of Turner’s effort to heighten the scope of his art by allowing him to approach the kinds of universal, instructive themes that were crucial to history painting’s elevated status.
In Snowstorm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps (1812), the tail end of the Carthaginian army is being picked off by local tribesmen in the foreground while, in the far distance, a tiny figure on an elephant heads for the sunlit lowlands of Italy. All are dwarfed by the awe-inspiring setting and the overwhelming power of the snowstorm’s vortex of destructive energy (an anticlassical compositional motif which the artist returned to throughout his career).
By this time, Turner was working on his own never-finished poem, “The Fallacies of Hope.” From that epic he extracted verses which pointed to Hannibal’s defeat in central Italy as the result of its dissipation and decline in moral fiber and martial virtue during its sojourn in the seductive Italian countryside.
During the first two decades of Turner’s adult life, Britain was constantly at war with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, and this deeply patriotic painter was preoccupied with the conflict which threatened the island nation. Of course, one of the decisive battles of the Napoleonic Wars was the naval victory at Trafalgar, off the coast of Spain, where the British defeated the combined French and Spanish fleets. Turner’s two paintings celebrating the victory dominate one of the galleries. In The Battle of Trafalgar, as Seen from the Mizen Starboard Shrouds of the Victory(1806), he focuses on the moment when the victorious hero of the battle, Admiral Nelson, is felled by a sniper’s bullet. Nelson lies on the deck of the ship, left of center. A bold compositional diagonal leads toward the right top of the canvas where the smoking gun of the French marksman, positioned high in the rigging of the French vessel, can be seen. The Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805 (1823-1824), Turner’s only royal commission, is a huge work more akin to a scene from a Hollywood epic. Turner celebrates the occasion but also shows the confusion which attends such victory in a sea battle. Moving closer, one notices in the foreground the devastating toll of the war through the desperation of the scores of men who are struggling for their lives in the waters churned by the battle action. They seem to be reaching out from the canvas in our direction, as if hoping there were some chance we could come to their assistance in their terrible plight.
On an October evening in his 60th year, Turner witnessed the devastating fire that destroyed the Houses of Parliament, the symbol of Britain’s historical and political legacy of representative government. In dozens of sketches and watercolors depicting the disaster, some of which were surely composed on site, the artist saw the theme which he had brooded over all his life–the mighty power of nature’s destructive forces–being acted out in front of him. At the same time, the combination of elements involved in a great conflagration such as this, where fire, water, and air swirled in a maelstrom of heat and light reflected on the water, appealed to Turner’s aesthetic sensibilities.
The studies resulted in two oil paintings of the same name, The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, October 16, 1834 (1835), which presented the scene from different vantage points along the banks of the Thames. This particular exhibition marks the first time these astounding works in oil and watercolor have ever been exhibited. For this reason alone, a visit is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Over the decades, Turner’s work became increasingly experimental, and as it did so, he left many of his admirers surprised, provoked, and bewildered. There was always controversy about his rough handling, high-keyed color, and sketchiness. Among his detractors was the essayist William Hazlitt, who observed that Turner’s later work consisted of “tinted steam” and “paintings of nothing and very like.”
But Turner was fortunate in his champions. No less an expert judge than Alfred Lord Tennyson called Turner the Shakespeare of painting. The artist clearly encouraged such a comparison, going so far as to claim he was born on the same day as Shakespeare and painting, in Juliet and her Nurse (1836), one of his most controversial works. Turner sets the scene in Venice, with a panoramic view of St. Mark’s, when anyone with even a passing acquaintance with the story of Romeo and Juliet will recall that it is “In fair Verona where we lay our scene.”
The error was duly noted by hostile critics, one of whom suggested this was evidence of the aging Turner’s senility. That, in turn, aroused the young John Ruskin to rise to Turner’s defense in a letter. The letter was never sent, but Ruskin went on to write the first volume of Modern Painters (1843), a brilliant defense of the truth of Turner’s landscapes which transformed the way readers in Victorian England and America looked at visual art.
As early as the 1820s the always-strategic Turner began to prepare for his posthumous reputation by writing in his will a gift to the nation of all his unsold works, with instructions that several were to be hung next to the Old Masters who had inspired them.
One of his works in the bequest, Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus–Homer’s Odyssey (1829), was described by Ruskin as the central work of Turner’s career. Ulysses stands aloft on his ship loudly mocking the one-eyed Cyclops he has blinded while his men roar their approval. As is typical with Turner, the ostensible subject is dwarfed by the real subject, which is the luminous aurora burning through the clouds in one of the most beautiful and magnificent sunrises in all of art. In this morning light we can see the birth of the Hudson River School in America and the Impressionism of Monet and Pissarro in France. And as is so often the case throughout his amazing career, Turner is forging a modern path while he participates fully in the great tradition of those who preceded him.
By leaving his paintings to the nation, Turner was implicitly laying his claim as a turning point in the history of art, in that his work was distinguished by both its absorption of, and improvement upon, the work of his great predecessors. Moreover, he never lost the 18th-century belief in the social responsibility of art: that painting could encompass the whole range of human achievement, and offer useful lessons to those with eyes to see.
Joseph Phelan is an editor at Artcyclopedia.com.
