Turner at the Tate

Turner, Moonlight, a Study at Mill bank, exhibited 1797. 

"A penny for the old guy. The original London Eye wasn't a Ferris wheel on the Thames, but J.M.W. Turner, whose visual genius and all-encompassing vision engulfed everything in its path." Until the electroshock treatment applied by Francis Bacon, generations of British painters were subsumed by him. Paying obeisance to the great man is both a duty and a delight when visiting The Tate, and now the Turner galleries have been completely rehung for the first time since the mid-Nineties.

He was born on Shakespeare’s birthday in Covent Garden and carried the wrong accent all his life. When Constable, the other great landscapist of the era, met him for the first time, he said that Turner was uncouth, “as expected,” but had a great mind. Indeed. In the new galleries one of the most fascinating rooms pairs six or eight Constables with various Turners. Born within a year of each other, in 1775 and 1776, Turner was the precocious meteor and Constable the plodder.

At 21 and 22 Turner made his first Royal Academy pictures, both depictions of moonlight, a notoriously difficult illumination to capture on canvas. You have to lean in to squint at the astonishing detail that he has carefully inscribed in subtle shades of black and brown, a really virtuoso effect.

Turner, Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps, exhibited 1812.

The most remarkable account tells of Turner setting up several canvases in a row to work on simultaneously. He did this by applying one color of paint to each canvas, going down the line one after another. Then he’d pick up a second color, return to the first canvas, and apply it down the line until the works were done — or almost done.
The twentieth century was much taken with the way he prefigured Impressionism and modern abstraction (a claim that makes some art scholars huffy, since Turner’s aim wasn't the same as Monet’s or Whistler’s or Graham Sutherland’s), so it’s a surprise to realize that his genius was market-minded, practical, and even conventional in choosing subjects.

These new galleries are a delight because they are intelligently arranged and contain descriptive notes beside each painting that are interesting, and devoid of art-speak.

But he never bores and always amazes me standing before the sea. Turner made the ocean so turbulent, filled not just with storm-tossed waves but violence, wreckage, sea monsters, glorious galleons, rust buckets going to their grave, even howling blizzards like a frost-bitten Last Judgment — in short, a whole world floating in watery dreams. In comparison with my last post of one of the pieces I had done over Christmas 'Thunder Waves' which was mainly inspired by Turner, and how he managed to compose fantasy and nature and make the correlation flow in each of his paintings.

Bringing form out of chaos while keeping the thrill of chaos was his unique achievement. At the end of his life Leonardo da Vinci attempted the same thing, but in miniature, when he filled notebooks with sketches of running water. Nature’s eddies are fascinating because they capture the eye without allowing the eye to rest on anything tangible, much less grasp it. Some commentators have been baffled by Leonardo’s obsession and consider it, politely, a huge waste of time and talent. In Turner’s hands, the impossible was achieved beyond anything Leonardo left behind. Snow, wind, and steam pass ghost-like through our existence. Turner makes them as haunting as they really are, poised all around the solidity of everyday things. Like light, the most mystifying elements in Nature are fleeting and uncapturable. But Turner was a master of light, too, a notoriously difficult illumination to capture on canvas.