J.M.W. Turner at the Metropolitan Museum

Last night we went to see the new J.M.W. Turner exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum. The Metropolitan Museum is possibly my favorite place in New York City.  Our first apartment was only a few blocks from it, and I bought a membership so that I could take three-year-old C.Z. there for an hour at a time.  I'd let her lead my around by the finger, and often she'd take me to the Venetian Rococo bedroom, known affectionately as "the flying babies," because there were gold putti all over the ceiling.  Old ladies would smile at us. Fast forward ten years, and I have a teenager who, despite insisting that painting is Mom's thing, knows a decent amount about art history. 

Anyway, this exhibit is one of those once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to see a substantial selection of his paintings on this side of the Atlantic. (Though out of about 900 paintings, these are hardly the majority.) When I go to one of these enormous Metropolitan Museum shows, I try to pace myself, only spending a short amount of time in each room so that I get to see the overall layout of the exhibit and decide which rooms I really want to concentrate on.  The problem with this exhibit was that I got wrapped up from the first room and totally forgot about pacing myself, so that by the end, I was too exhausted to appreciate some of the best paintings.  So, I guess I'll have to go back. 

 

I don't pretend to be either a Turner expert or a skilled writer about art history (and I'm not scathing and ironic like the writers for the NY Times), so I'll just give my sketchy impressions, sort of mental notes on first sight:  Turner adapted his watercolor techniques to his oil paintings, rubbing and scumbling (adding a lighter color to the surface so that the layers underneath show through) and working in washes, which fed into his revolutionary ability to paint lighting effects.  One could see this first hand in the presence of the paintings, particularly in the unfinished ones.  (Unfinished paintings are such a help to artists, who want to learn not just about context, but also about technique.)  He was daring enough to put the sun directly in his paintings, not off to the side somewhere.  It's fun to look at the paintings from an angle and see where the paint, usually white or yellow, is built up.

He experimented with color, even with individual pigments, like a scientist.  His palette tends surprisingly to primary colors. His clouds have a certain skilled quality of brushstroke like that of a Chinese calligrapher. You can't pretend to have that skill if you don't, because the evidence is in the stroke.  His human figures don't have this quality.  He adds them, usually in great masses, for the sake of drama, but you can tell he doesn't feel as excited about them.  They're clumsy compared to his clouds.  

His choice of subjects is guided by his interest in the power of nature, what 18th and 19th century artists would have called the Sublime.  There's lots of disaster, lots of shipwreck, mountain cragginess, storm, smoke and fire.  The sublimity and the color go hand in hand after about 1828, because somewhere along the line (likely in Venice) Turner discovered that clouds and smoke created fabulous color effects.  The effect, not surprisingly, is Romantic.  

I like to read Paul Johnson for information about Turner, because Johnson is a frustrated painter himself, but he's also a historian, so he knows both technique and context.  Here's what Johnson has to say about Turner: 

His Regulus, painted in Rome in 1828, had its lighting scheme completely transformed by Turner on the walls of the British Institute in London, watched by an astonished Sir John Gilbert.  "He was absorbed in his work, did not look about him but kept on scumbling a lot of white into the picture--nearly all over it--The picture was a mass of red and yellow in all varieties.  Every object was in this fiery state.  He had a large palette, nothing on it but a huge lump of flake white; he had two or three biggish hog-tools for work with, and with these he was driving the white into all the hollows and every part of the surface...The picture gradually became wonderfully effective, just the effect of brilliant sunshine absorbing everything, and throwing a misty haze over every object.  Standing sideway at the canvas, I saw that the sun was a lump of white, standing out like the boss of a shield." 

We have considered Turner's technical approach at length because he had more effect on other painters, in the long run, than any master since Rembrandt and should be seen as the ultimate progenitor of the modern movement in art.  His craftsmanship has to be emphasized, but it should also be grasped that the dynamic of his art was strongly intellectual and emotional.  Like Beethoven he was little educated outside his craft, but he read widely all his life, seized on ideas, thought about them, transformed them, and applied them in his art.  Modern research has revealed that the literary and intellectual content of his work is much greater than hitherto supposed.  

...Almost from the start Turner was adventurous in using color and depicting light. By 1810 he was credited with founding the "white school," which waged war against the browns and sepias of the classicists and moved decisively into the upper range of colors...The supposedly radical Examiner referred to his "intemperance of bright color.  The Literary Gazette accused him of replacing "the magic of nature" by "the magic of skill," when, in fact, he was trying to do the opposite and use truth to destroy artificial conventions.

--Paul Johnson, Birth of the Modern, p. 623-624

I just like to stand there and admire his ability to layer paint.  

Here's the NY Times review.

Above Photo: Joseph Mallord William Turner (English, 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 x 123 cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art, The John Howard McFadden Collection.  Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum.  More images at www.metmuseum.org