LATE TURNER: PAINTING SET FREE
The Guardian newspaper of 9th
September 2014 published a full page piece about the exhibition at Tate Britain
that runs from 10th September to 25th January 2015: Late Turner – Painting set free.
This is a summary of the main
article by Jonathan Jones (‘Visionary, mythic, extreme ... Turner’s late work
is like Wagner transmuted into paint’) and a summary of a smaller article on
the same page by Mark Brown (‘Dazzling colour that baffled the Victorians’.
Late Turner:
Painting set free
‘Visionary, mythic,
extreme ... Turner’s late work is like Wagner transmuted into paint’. J. Jones
Wagner and Turner are both artists
of myth on a grand scale. They both influenced
the Impressionists and early Modernists ‘who learned from them how colour could
be expressive, atmospheric, even abstract’.
Art historians argue that Turner was
a Romantic whose work embodies myth, and that to view Turner as an abstract artist
is to transfer 20th Century ideas inappropriately to the mid 19th
Century. But the exhibition under review
is a riposte to this viewpoint.
The Turners in the exhibition
foreshadow not only Monet’s Impression:
Sunrise, but also the surrealism of Dali and Ernst in ‘(Turner’s) trees
that float in the sky like glowing jellyfish, his encrustations of edible-seeming
paint’.
The exhibition presents the many
forms of painting that Turner engaged in during his last 16 years until his
death in 1851.
Both Wagner and Turner ‘take
Romanticism to such an extreme that it breaks apart and becomes modernist’.
‘Turner paints his own need to paint’.
‘Dazzling colour
that baffled the Victorians’. M. Brown
Turner’s nine late square paintings are
hung together for the first time in the exhibition.
In 1846, John Ruskin – formerly Turner’s
champion – reacted sceptically to Turner’s late style: he considered it to be ‘indicative
of mental disease’.
Turner’s late style was
radical. He asked a great deal of his
contemporaries as they viewed these works.
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