Wiliam Turner, Seascape With Storm Coming On, c. 1840, Oil on canvas, 91,4 x 121,6 cm. Tate, Bequeathed by the artist 1856. Photo: Tate, London 2007

FRANKFURT, GERMANY.-Long before abstraction was declared an avant-garde art form in the twentieth century, painters and graphic artists were creating images without any recognizable objects. The most prominent examples are found in the oeuvres of the landscape painter J. M. William Turner (1775-1851), the poet and draughtsman Victor Hugo (1802-1885) and the French “Symbolist” Gustave Moreau (1826-1898). The exhibition “Turner – Hugo – Moreau” represents the first endeavour to compare these three nineteenth-century authors of abstract imagery by juxtaposing some 130 of their watercolours, oil paintings, sketches and drawings, many of them unpublished to date. In contrast to previous presentations, the show emancipates itself from the perspective which takes the abstract art of the twentieth century as its vanishing point, and proposes a reassessment: The primary concern here is not “where do these abstract works lead?” but “what tradition do they follow?”. In its effort to answer this newly formulated question, the exhibition is more than just a presentation of the three artists’ oeuvres. With 80 further paintings, albums, rare books and art objects, it moreover draws attention to the two traditions forming the basis for abstract imagery since the eighteenth century: on the one hand the fascination with “blots” – “pictures” created by chance – and on the other hand the aesthetics of effect, i.e. theoretical reflections on how the means of painting affect the viewer. Lire la suite http://www.artdaily.com/section/news/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=21932

Victor Hugo, Composition Abstraite, c. 1865, Brown ink on paper, 5,8 x 12,1 cm. Maison de Victor Hugo, Paris