To Every Season ... Turner, Turner, Turner

by Beth S. Gersh-Nesic

Just what makes the Metropolitan Museum of Art's enormous retrospective "JMW Turner"--a show of explosive color and breath-taking vistas, one after another--so inexplicably lifeless, so inexplicably disappointing? Was it the number of paintings and watercolors? Over 140. Was it the number of rooms? Ten. Perhaps. Or maybe the problem was me: I stepped into the exhibition to visit with an artist who wasn't there.

I came to see to the artist who painted The Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On), 1840, The Fighting Téméraire, Tugged to her Last Berth to be Broken Up, 1838 and Rain, Steam and Speed, The Great Western Railway, 1844 (that's right: 1844!). And I hoped to see the paintings, too. My Turner is a Romantic moralizer. That painter was MIA (missing in action). In his stead I found Turner "the canny businessman," master of the Sublime and precursor to Modernism. At first Claudian--of the Lorrain kind (The Temple of Jupiter Panellenius, Restored, 1816), this Turner morphed temporarily into Canaletto (The Dogano, San Giorgio, Citella, from the Steps of the Europa, 1842) and then prefigured Helen Frankenthaler after he turned 50-something (Rough Sea, ca. 1844-6). Alas, JMW, your first retrospective in forty years suffers from TMT--too much Turner and too many Turners--minus the spunk of the persona we have come to know in art history textbooks. With so much to look at and so many variations, it's a wonder this demanding collection offers such a vague sense of the real you.


Joseph Mallord William Turner (British, 1775-1851)
Norham Castle, Sunrise, ca. 1845
Oil on canvas
90 13/16 x 121 in. (230.7 x 307.3 cm)
Bequeathed by the Artist, 1856
Tate, London
© Tate, London


Nevertheless, the effort does not lack heart. Beginning with views of castles, mountain passes and the sea (Fisherman at Sea, 1796, Turner's first oil painting exhibited at the Royal Academy's annual exhibition) and ending with several unfinished works (such as Norham Castle, Sunrise, ca. 1845), the curatorial team of Gary Tinterow, Engelhard Curator in Charge, and Kathryn Calley Galitz, Assistant Curator, constructed a convincing arc that connects Turner to tradition and modernity. Rooted in France's acclaimed seventeenth-century painters Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, Turner's hubris may have been to reach too fast and too soon for a light-drenched atmosphere in painting, far in advance of the Impressionists during the late nineteenth-century and Color Field painters during the second-half of the twentieth-century. Like Icarus, Turner was drawn to excessive light, which brought about his downfall. The artist fell into obscurity in his later years.

Joseph Mallord William Turner was born in 1775 to a barber and wigmaker who lived in London's Convent Garden. Just shy of fifteen, Turner enrolled at the Royal Academy and discovered the seventeenth-century classicists, such as Claude Lorrain. Twelve years later the precocious Englishman became a full Academician. In the exhibition catalogue, we learn that he was an "assured alchemist," and a person capable of "calculated showmanship." His strong ego steeled his resolve in the face of negative criticism that demeaned his free brushstroke and innovative color combinations: "the fruits of a diseased eye and a reckless hand." For Turner, color guided his imagination and drove his emotional content. This Romantic artist never married, lived with his father for thirty years and died at his mistress' home in 1851 at the age of seventy-six.

Five years after his death, the Turner Bequest was acquired by the Tate Museum--300 oil paintings and over 30,000 watercolors and sketches (which John Ruskin catalogued). Turner died underappreciated by all but his loyal fans (Ruskin, Thomas Cole, Thomas Moran and Frederic Edwin Church, among others). They admired "not so much the objects he saw as the light which played around them." ¹


Joseph Mallord William Turner (British, 1775-1851)
The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16th October 1834, 1835
Oil on canvas
36 1/2 x 48 1/2 in. (92.7 x 123.2 cm)
The John Howard McFadden Collection, 1928
Philadelphia Museum of Art
© Philadelphia Museum of Art


The emphasis on Turner's mastery of color and light organizes the procession of pictures. In this respect, The Burning of the Houses of Parliament, October 16, 1834, two oil paintings and nine watercolor sketches (which may or may not have been produced while witnessing the conflagration) anchors the show midway through. Here sheer washes of burnt oranges, aquatic blues and violet purples overlap in accordance with an instinctual grace and ease that borders on pure abstraction--abstract in the sense of reducing recognizable images to elemental forms. Turner's delicate strokes, sure hand and experienced manipulation seem energized by an anti-classical spontaneity. Had the MMA exhibited only the two versions of The Burning of the Houses of Parliament, from Philadelphia Museum of Art and Cleveland Museum of Art (not in the New York show), with the nine watercolor sketches and the watercolors The Burning of the Houses of Parliament from Old Palace Yard with Westminster Abbey, ca. 1834 and Rome Burning, ca. 1834, it would have been sufficient.

The Burning of the Houses of Parliament series fascinates and terrifies, demonstrating Turner's interpretation of the "Sublime." Defined in Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (published in 1757), the Sublime is "the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling." It's "awesome," in the original sense of the word. Turner's early oil paintings of distant castles exemplify the Picturesque (Caernarvon Castle, 1799), pleasant views of contemporary scenery. His more ambitious cavernous mountain passes of death-defying views, such as The Devil's Bridge, St. Gotthard (ca. 1803-4) and The Pass of St. Gotthard (ca. 1803-4) perfectly capture the Sublime: here, incomparable splendor at acrophobia-inducing heights.

Less than ten years later, a dark foreground giving way to an illuminated sky in Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps (1812) hints at Turner's discovery of his signature translucent washes. This astonishingly innovative painting seems stranded, like the Carthaginian soldiers, among the numerous banal landscapes and seascapes that fill most of the galleries at this point in the show.


Joseph Mallord William Turner (British, 1775-1851)
Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps, 1812
Oil on canvas
57 1/2 x 93 1/2 in. (146 x 237.5 cm)
Bequeathed by the Artist, 1856
Tate, London
© Tate, London


And yet, nothing could make up for the absence of Turner's The Slave Ship (owned by National Gallery, London) and the personality who painted it. With its blood-red surface The Slave Ship forces us to bear witness to a heinous practice: throwing manacled slaves into the sea in order to claim "property loss" for insurance purposes. To further dramatize this unspeakable act, Turner includes sharks already feeding on their prey.

Another MIA politically-charged painting, The Fighting Téméraire (also owned by the National Gallery, London) deprived us from admiring "the greatest painting in a Britain," according to a 2005 poll sponsored by the National Gallery and BBC Radio 4. This stirring portrait of a grand battleship (made famous during the Battle of Trafalgar) led out to sea by a pint-sized steamboat reveals Turner's ambivalence as he stood on the threshold of modernity. Out with the old and in with the new. Paired with Rain, Steam and Speed (which celebrates the new "iron horse"), these paintings mirror Turner's own life: his aggressive push for new techniques and new aesthetics among mainstream artists, and then his lonely drift into old age and neglect.

J. M. W. Turner is a big show that stretches out an incomplete story. Taken in small doses, rather than all at once, you may be able to salvage from this vast sea of art a few aspects of Turner that will satisfy.

View a selection of works from J. M. W. Turner.

References and Further Reading:

Davies, Penelope J. E., et. al. Janson's History of
Art: The Western Tradition.
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice-Hall, 2007 (seventh edition)

Janson, H. W. and Anthony F. Janson.
History of Art: The Western Tradition
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice-Hall, 2004 (revised sixth edition)

Kleiner, Fred S. Gardner's Age Through the Ages,
A Concise Global History.
Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2008 (second edition)

Landow, George P. "Ruskin's Allegorical Interpretations of Turner."
Retrieved 15 September, 2008

Stokstad, Marilyn. Art: A Brief History.
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice-Hall, 2007 (third edition)

Tate Britain: "Turner Online."

Warrell, Ian (ed.). J. M. W. Turner (exh. cat.)
New York :Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Tate Publishing, 2007.

¹ (from The Spectator, quoted in the catalogue, p. 228)


J. M. W. Turner toured on the following schedule:

• October 1, 2007-January 6, 2008: The National Gallery of Art, Fourth Street and Constitution Avenue, NW, Washington, D.C. 20565 (Telephone: 202-737-4215; Website).
  
  
• February 10-May 25, 2008: Dallas Museum of Art, 1717 North Harwood, Dallas, Texas 75201 (Telephone: 214-922-1200; Website).
  
  
• July 1-September 21, 2008: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028 (Telephone: 212-535-7710; Website).

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From your Guide: Beth Gersh-Nesic is an art history professor, author, art critic and the director of the New York Arts Exchange, an arts education service which offers tours, lectures and workshops in various venues, including museums, galleries, artists' studios and arts organizations.