JMW Turner

It says something for the ongoing vitality of Turner’s work that he remains a controversial figure in a way which can’t really be said of other canonical premoderns, whose reputations tend to be more settled. So it is that a hit film has just been based on Turner’s life, and there are still debates to be had on several questions. Was he hopeless at painting people and, if so, does that matter? Is his use of myth overblown? Which works are finished? What would Turner have wanted to show? Does his late style boil down the essence of his achievements, or was it just the result of failing eyesight and health? Did he anticipate Impressionism or even abstraction?

The show’s title sets up another question: from what is Turner’s late painting to be ‘set free’? The curators (Sam Smiles, David Blayney Brown and Amy Concannon) are clear enough: “whilst celebrating his liberation from conventional aesthetic constraints it also aims to set his painting free from Victorian prejudices and reductive later stereotypes.” That may sound like a lot of liberty, but it’s worth pointing out that Turner’s painting was never free from what so much subsequent art has set out to escape: the history of civilization and the lessons and inspirations of Turner’s artistic forebears are always explicitly present.

It’s a big show: 173 exhibits from Turner’s final 16 years after he turned 60 in 1835. 80 percent of them are from the Tate’s collection, though, and there was a case for seeing the London instantiation of this touring show as half of an even a bigger one. The Clore Gallery, as ever, contains a rotating selection from the Turner Bequest, which has 300 oil paintings and thousands of sketches. The Clore covers the whole of Turner’s career, and includes rooms concentrating on colour trials and studio sketches. It’s of comparable interest but with the paradox of being free of both the £16.50 entry charge of “Painting Set Free” and its crowds. One of the Clore’s displays is dedicated to Turner and the body, and it’s hard to deny that his people suffer from a certain clunkiness, as he himself recognized in abandoning the large nudes at the centre of that room. Yet plenty of contemporary painters make a point of avoiding the figure for psychological or emotional reasons, and in the vast bulk of Turner’s work, figures are present to indicate scale and trigger a narrative, functions they discharge adequately without being given enough prominence to disturb the majesty of nature or architecture.

Should we still take his mythological tendencies seriously? One of the catalogue essays is actually entitled “‘Poetical’ or ‘Preposterous’? History Painting,” presumably not by its author, David Blayney Brown, as it’s a straight description of what Turner did which leaves us to make that judgment for ourselves. Modern sensibilities and knowledge are against Turner, but I’d say the verdict is mixed, even if we do make the effort to move into the story. For every mythic engagement in which Turner finds a persuasive visual way of reinforcing the story there is another in which the narrative is more a distraction than an addition to the scene. In the former camp, for example, I would place Regulus, 1828, reworked 1837, in which the dazzling sun prefigures the eponymous Consul’s fate: his eyelids cut off, he was left to go blind in the fierce North African light. In the latter, I would put The Death of Actaeon, with a distant View of Montjovet, Val d’Aodta, c. 1837, in which the vaguely indicated characters struggle to carry any narrative. The mythic can also edge into the melodramatic, when one may start to think there’s quite enough drama already in Turner’s pure landscape visions.

Yet such questions hardly signify as we walk around the show. Rather, we’re repeatedly reminded of the things Turner could do at least as well as anyone before or since: not just handle watercolour with sublime luminosity but create the effects of watercolour in oils; paint fire, and the sun—especially at its setting—as the palpable fire that it is; handle multiple light sources (such as moon, fire and lamp); convey an evanescent atmosphere, particularly a Venetian one; show how sea meets sky; and energetically traverse large distances to bring back a vivid impression of immediate witnessing—undiluted by his almost invariable process of being able to draw on the spot and only later add colour. That bearing witness is attuned to the modern preference for the journalistic rather than the mythic, and is fed by such tales as Turner hiring a boat to get the best view of Parliament burning, or having himself strapped to a mast to observe a storm.

That sense—and reality—to which Turner bears witness has a much clearer grounding than any imputation of abstract intent. In fact, the two tendencies are pretty much incompatible: as Sam Smiles points out in the catalogue, one problem with presenting late Turner as a visionary prefiguring Impressionism and abstraction is that it denies how closely he was tied to his times. The other is the lack of evidence that Turner thought that way. Little of his intent can be read into the studies—background washes and canvases abandoned at preliminary stages and left in the studio. Moreover, as one of the Clore rooms shows, Turner was making such sketches earlier, too. If he changed, argues Smiles, it may have been in what he was prepared to exhibit rather than in what he produced. “Turner was producing sketches that were very free, that you might assume to be ‘late,’ from quite early in his career, certainly from the 1800s. But the paintings he was producing from these were relatively conventional. As his career progressed the gap between his sketchbook experiments and his finished paintings narrowed till he was exhibiting works that his contemporaries could hardly accept as works of art at all.” All the same, we can be sure that there is plenty here which Turner wouldn’t have exhibited.

None of that is to deny the exciting economy of the most minimal works: Sun Setting Over a Lake, c. 1840–45 or Sunrise, with a Boat between Headlands, c 1845, for instance. It’s just that the effect comes not from Turner looking forward, but from us looking backward. And Turner was painting such radical works as the Snow Storm—which Ruskin thought he shouldn’t have exhibited in 1842—at the same time as more conventional paintings such as The Fighting Temeraire. Yet even if Turner’s late style was not a radical break, he certainly kept on experimenting. We see that in a striking room of nine paintings with square or circular compositions, pushing Turner beyond the comfort zone of the landscape format and into a predominance of whirling vortex compositions; and, less successfully, in the set of whaling pictures which show him willing to imagine a place to which he’d never been. One characteristic of late Turner which can’t be doubted is that he riled the critics of the day and his early biographers, who read the work of the 1840s through the assumption that his eccentric behaviour and physical decline—Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, alcoholism, chronic fatigue and cataracts have all been retro-diagnosed—found direct reflection in the work. One critic advised exhibition goers to make a note of Turner’s titles as a reminder that he wasn’t showing the canvas he had used to test his palette. That isn’t how it looks from the perspective of this powerful show. Whatever problems Turner faced, and whatever he meant posterity to see, the curators are right to claim that the Tate “brings ‘Late Turner’ back to life as a supremely inventive and original artist, completely engaged in the culture of his time and as committed as ever to communicating his art and ideas.” ❚

“Late Turner: Painting Set Free” was exhibited at Tate Britain, London, from September 10, 2014 to January 25, 2015.

Paul Carey-Kent is a freelance art critic in Southhampton, England, whose writings can be found at <paulsartworld.blogspot.ca>.