Palisades-News-March-18-2015

Palisades News
Page 20 March 18, 2015
J.W.M.
Turner:
Master
of Sea,
Mist and
Light
By LIBBY MOTIKA
Palisades News Contributor
If the renowned 18th-century British
artist J.W.M. Turner could have slipped
into the eye of a hurricane, he most certainly
would have rendered the power and
intensity of the storm looking from the inside
out, with an emotional intensity that
seemed impossible with paint on canvas.
But this was the man who claimed that
he was tied to the mast of a ship on the
night of a storm and witnessed it for four
hours. When looking at the finished painting,
“Snow Storm: Steamboat off a Harbour’s
Mouth,” the viewer is caught up in
that very vortex.
Turner was captivated by natural phenomena—sunrises,
fog and the mutable skies—
J.M.W. Turner self-portrait
“The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, October 16, 1834.”
and he was obsessed with natural catastrophes,
raging storms and conflagrations.
Turner was captivated by natural phenomena—sunrises,
fog and the mutable
skies—and he was obsessed with natural catastrophes,
raging storms and conflagrations.
“When the Tower of London was burning
down in 1821, Turner applied to the
Duke of Wellington to go into the Tower
and make studies, but he was denied. So he
made the studies from across the water,
which are so incredibly fresh to our eye,”
says Julian Brooks, co-curator of the exhibition
“J.M.W. Turner: Painting Set Free”
at the Getty Museum through May 24.
The 60 watercolors and oil paintings on
view represent the last 15 years of Turner’s
life. Remarkably, these are the most expressive,
dynamic and innovative of his life’s
work, says Timothy Potts, director of the
J. Paul Getty Museum.
“This is an exhibition with a thesis,” Potts
continues. “It wants to look at Turner’s late
work and understand it going back to the
end of the 18th century and early 19th century
when he is consciously drawing on the
work of other great landscape artists. Then
you have this flourish that is so totally different.
Instead of defining and representing
reality in a traditional way, the artist’s late
work is much more expressive. It flows between
solid and liquid, air and wind and
sea—all these elements of nature in a very
expressive and atmospheric way. That’s
what appeals to modern audiences.” It has
Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art: The John Howard McFadden Collection, 1928
been seen as, in a sense, proto-modern.
Turner was born in London in 1775 and
lived as the Industrial Revolution was transforming
England from hand production
methods to machines. He showed an early
talent for drawing and watercolor and was
admitted to the Royal Academy of Art in
1789 at age 14. During these early years, he
developed the custom of traveling throughout
Britain, producing a wide range of
sketches for working up into studies and
watercolors.
Throughout his life, Turner continued to
travel every summer on his own, often on
foot, having no retinue carrying his bags. He
had his boots resoled and re-heeled countless
times, but he was just driven to carry
on. This was where his subject matter was.
He expanded his itinerary to the Continent,
after the end of the Napoleonic wars in
1815 when Continental travel was possible.
Venice was one of his favorite places
and it was easy to see why. It was all about
(Continued on Page 21)
“Venice at Sunrise from the Hotel Europa, with Campanile of San Marco,” about 1840.
Photo © Tate, London 2014