J.M.W. Turner @ the Metropolitan Museum

5 juillet 2008

J.M.W. Turner @ the Metropolitan Museum

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “J.M.W. Turner” is a beast of a show. With nearly 150 works in oil and watercolor spanning more than half a century, it will either win you over or wear you out. Or it will alternate, gallery by gallery, or wall by wall, as the art swings between overblown and moving, inspired and mechanical.

“Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps” by artist Joseph William Mallord Turner. Photo: Tate, London

In the history of Western painting, the great British artist Joseph William Mallord Turner (1775-1851) looms as a prodigiously gifted, productive and innovative figure. His complex legacy reflects his interests not only as an artist, but as a poet, naturalist, philosopher and lover of music and theater.

”View of London from Greenwich” (circa 1825). Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art

His paintings of storms at sea or Alpine plunges are early examples of the natural sublime; his squalls of paint presage the Romantics, the Realists, the Impressionists and even the Abstract Expressionists. He built luminosity into his canvases by painting on white grounds (rather than the traditional black), and he used color as color and paint as paint more directly than anyone before him.

“The Shipwreck”. Photo: Tate, London

Turner’s works pop out when seen one at a time in a museum collection. Seeing them in bulk is another matter. His innovations can be dulled by its repetitiveness and unvarying skill. In the present Turner’s achievement still seems to be up for grabs, something to fight about, which adds excitement to the ups and downs of the Met show.

”Fishermen at Sea” Photo: Tate, London

Turner (1775-1851) rode the cusp of art history as if it were a great wave crashing through one of his seascapes, and this show rides it with him. He sketched incessantly from the age of 10; he was already honing his watercolor technique when he was admitted to the Royal Academy at the age of 14 (in 1789). He became a full member in 1802 at the age of 26.

”Light and Colour (Goethe's Theory) — The Morning after the Deluge — Moses writing the Book of Genesis.”. Photo: Tate, London

During Turner’s long career European society segued from the agrarian to the industrial. Turner himself veered between scenes of antiquity and steamboats, between history painting and reportage. He recorded the battle between the British and French fleets at Trafalgar (which he did not see) and the burning of the Houses of Parliament (which he did).

“The Battle of Trafalgar” (1805) Photo: National Maritime Museum, London

He looked back to classically inspired painters like Poussin and Claude, who sprinkled their landscapes with temples and people in togas and yet, like Courbet, he used paint in a new, daringly physical way. “The Houses of Parliament on Fire” might almost have been painted by Monet with a little input from Philip Guston.

“The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons” (1834) Photo: Philadelphia Museum of Art

Often there’s a slickness to Turner’s work that is more Paul Jenkins than Guston. He just seems to be in production, churning out oceangoing turmoil and vortices of water, air and sunlight and then locking them in focus with little figures — the victims of bad weather or biblical wrath — struggling at the bottom.

“ Snow Storm—Steam Boat off a Harbor's Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water, and Going by the Lead. The Author was in This Storm on the Night the Ariel Left Harwich” (1842)

Turner’s best work lies somewhere in between tumultuous and placid. In “Peace — Burial at Sea” the sharp black silhouettes of the sails of a burning ship anchor the quavering depictions of sea, air, fire and smoke.

Photo: Tate, London

In “Mortlake Terrace, the Seat of William Moffatt, Esq.; Summer’s Evening” the main action is the sun, sending its golden light shimmering across the Thames to give a row of trees long fingerlike shadows, while a spry little black dog (painted on paper stuck to the surface) barks at the passing boats.

Photo: National Gallery of Art

In the tiny watercolor “Shields, on the River Tyne,” workers load coal from a ship into smaller boats by the yellow light of torches; the rest of the river, shrouded in blue and overseen by a silvery moon, seems to be another world altogether.

Photo: Tate, London

Turner never lost his connection to reality. One of the last, semiabstract paintings in the show’s final gallery is a sunrise view of Norham Castle, which is the subject of a Claudian watercolor in the first gallery. Amid its gorgeous smudges of blue castle, yellow sun and pale ochre shores are two cows, faint but definite, who have come for their morning drink.

Photo: Tate, London

This show may be wearying because there is something imperious and impersonal about the sheer force of Turner’s ambition. It is almost as if his drive to capture nature or history in motion was so intense that it didn’t leave room for anyone else, including the viewer. Maybe that’s why despite all his hard work and even the majesty of his vision, you can emerge from this exhibition impressed but oddly untouched, even chilled.