The light sings: Turner's late blossoming

Abstract

Mike Leigh's Mr Turner catalogues unflinchingly the aches and afflictions of old age. Near the beginning of this absorbing bio-flick, which covers the last 25 years of the Romantic artist's life, Turner's elderly “Dadda” coughs up the contents of his lungs into a pot. Soon after we see him nailed to his deathbed by consumption, babbling about the madness that darkened the twilight years of Turner's mother.It's not long before the great cockney visionary is himself declining and falling, quite literally, and quite often, at the easel or descending stairs to the sea. A doctor diagnoses a failing heart, but Turner continues to burn the candle, and to fuel the fire of his creativity with glass after glass. Before long the grunts of satisfaction that once accompanied his every brushstroke have turned into groans, and every gruff monosyllable is smothered by an almighty wheeze. It's a grim business, waiting for the reaper. And when he finally arrives, he lives up to his name by going about his business grimly. He tears up Turner's heart with such violence that the defiant pagan hardly has enough breath to exclaim: “The sun is God! Ha!”There is a touch of Hogarthian theatricality about these scenes, but the keynote is the sort of detailed naturalism associated with Leigh's early films, and with northern European art (a tradition towards which Mr Turner nods). So the film sets up an interesting dialogue between the transcendental paintings and the all too mortal flesh that produced them. It's a materialist portrait of a man who painted angels. The death mask of the painter on display in the Late Turner—Painting Set Free exhibition at Tate Britain testifies to the accuracy of Leigh's study of deterioration. It's so gaunt it made me think of the old man in Shakespeare, “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”.Contemporary critics were quick—as both film and exhibition catalogue show—to connect the painter's physical decline to a falling off of his art. Turner had always been ridiculed for his “intoxicated” style, his “lurid” colours, and “obscurity”. After 1835, when the artist turned 60, critics diagnosed in his works the “infirmities of old age”. “Have his eyes been put out by the glare of his own colours?” There were darker suggestions too that the “frenzied” freedom of the late style finally unmasked inherited insanity—there had once been method in Turner's madness, but no more.“Ageism” coloured these criticisms. In the early 19th century old age and disease were synonymous, and “dotage” believed to commence at age 60 years. In capitalist industrial England utility was one of the cardinal virtues, and work a strenuous duty which the elderly found difficult to perform. The Romantic poets didn't help with their celebration of childhood as the phase when the doors of perception were open, the “vision splendid” fading with age. There arose a cult of precocious natural genius, which had helped burnish the reputation of the young Turner as the boy wonder of English art.Late Turner aims to set the record straight. It showcases Turner's autumn and winter as seasons of lucidity and fruitfulness, which featured a late blossoming of his finest work. Its broader aim is to promote a positive image of older age, with an event on “Late Creativity” accompanying the show. (For all its gritty realism Mr Turner also espouses “grey pride”, offering ample evidence that there was plenty of creative and sexual life left in the old sea dog in his seventies.) The Tate show celebrates Turner's vitality: his energy glows on the exhibition's walls like a sun bursting through the haze of one of his own canvases. On display are more than 150 works, representing only a fraction of the painter's multifarious production during his last 16 years. Here are oils on canvases of assorted sizes, watercolours on paper of diverse colours, and plein-air sketches which Turner dashed off during his many travels.Turner lost none of his appetite for experiment with age. In his late sixties he began using a small square support for a series of revolutionary twinned canvases in round, square, and octagonal formats. With their centrifugal compositions, prismatic colours, and mystical motifs works such as Light and Colour/Shade and Darkness make postmodern “spin paintings” look insubstantial and old-fashioned. They were so ahead of their own time that baffled reviewers said they might as well be hung upside down.Mercifully for Turner, many of the paintings in the show's final room were not exhibited in his lifetime; otherwise critics might have clamoured for him to be carted him off to Bedlam. In Norham Castle the artist “set painting free” by dissolving form into colour, and transforming colour into pure light, to arrive at that near abstraction and proto-impressionism which have made him one of the most influential English painters in art history. Wandering and wondering around this iridescent cave of mist and mystery is a synaesthetic experience. The light sings.Throughout the exhibition you marvel at the economy of means with which Turner captured the variety of a natural scene. Gusto was always his guiding principle, energy his eternal delight. With a few vigorous brushstrokes, forceful daubs of oil, or scratches of his palette knife, he conjured up vast and variegated land and seascapes. His trademark indistinctness and indeterminacy draws you in. It's up to you to finish Turner's pictures, momentarily fixing in your mind their fleeting forms, gazing intently at the dance of light and shade until the colour shines through.J M W Turner, Snow Storm—Steam Boat off a Harbour's Mouth (exhibited 1842)Show full captionOil paint on canvas support: 870 × 867 mmView Large Image Copyright © 2014 Tate. Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856The experience is exhilarating, when it isn't overwhelming. I defy anyone to look at Snow Storm—Steam Boat off a Harbour's Mouth without feeling seasick. Here Turner flings no more than a handful of hints in your face—masses of alternating darks and lights, parallel sets of visible brushstrokes, four clashing colours driven across a grey ground. And yet, as you stare on, images emerge and start to move. The horizon tilts, and you glimpse the outline of a ship; vortices of sea spray and snow rise and fall, and waves race across the canvas. You'll know the work is complete when the nausea kicks in. Turner's “impressionist” suggestiveness and “expressionist” violence appalled reviewers, who called Snow Storm a smudge of “soapsuds and whitewash”. Its veracity was as shocking as its novelty. Here, and in many of the works that followed, the artist achieved a truthfulness way beyond the reach of contemporary photography or Pre-Raphaelite verisimilitude. Cocking a snook at fashionable realism, Turner painted what he felt as well as what he saw. Aiming straight at the imagination, he deliberately bypasses the intellect. This is the kind of art which demands participation not analysis.In his tumultuous oils Turner's exuberant temperament embodies the ferocious energy of the natural world. In many of the watercolours on show he instead turns the volume down. Here delicate brushstrokes and imperceptible gradations of translucent colour exemplify nature's evanescence and mutability. The images of Venice abound in ephemeral effects, as light and shadow move gently across surfaces of rippling water and stone. Whether in tempestuous or mellow mode, Turner never sees nature as “still life”; it is in a continual process of becoming which his art reproduces rather than represents. That's one of the reasons why his images still seem fresh, the paint barely dry.I left Late Turner with an eye attuned to the beauties of nature, and utterly convinced of the curators' thesis. Far from being a “cracked pot” and a spent creative force at the age of 60, Turner was compos mentis, and just about to get into his artistic stride. By 1835 he had gained full awareness of his limitations and the limitations of his medium, along with the confidence to overcome them. He no longer translated his thoughts into paint via the dictionary of artistic convention, but thought in it directly, with a radical liberty. Time may have “made sad work” of Turner's body, as he himself complained during his painful crawl towards death, but it also brought understanding and experience. Those qualities may not count for much today when youth is fetishised and older people too often disregarded. In art, however, as this dazzling exhibition shows, they are everything.Mr Turner A film by Mike Leigh. Sony Pictures Classics, 2014. http://sonyclassics.com/mrturner/The EY Exhibition: Late Turner—Painting Set Free Tate Britain, London, UK, until Jan 25, 2014 http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/ey-exhibition-late-turner-painting-set-freeView Large Image Figure ViewerDownload Hi-res image Download (PPT)View Large Image Copyright © 2014 Tate Mike Leigh's Mr Turner catalogues unflinchingly the aches and afflictions of old age. Near the beginning of this absorbing bio-flick, which covers the last 25 years of the Romantic artist's life, Turner's elderly “Dadda” coughs up the contents of his lungs into a pot. Soon after we see him nailed to his deathbed by consumption, babbling about the madness that darkened the twilight years of Turner's mother. It's not long before the great cockney visionary is himself declining and falling, quite literally, and quite often, at the easel or descending stairs to the sea. A doctor diagnoses a failing heart, but Turner continues to burn the candle, and to fuel the fire of his creativity with glass after glass. Before long the grunts of satisfaction that once accompanied his every brushstroke have turned into groans, and every gruff monosyllable is smothered by an almighty wheeze. It's a grim business, waiting for the reaper. And when he finally arrives, he lives up to his name by going about his business grimly. He tears up Turner's heart with such violence that the defiant pagan hardly has enough breath to exclaim: “The sun is God! Ha!” There is a touch of Hogarthian theatricality about these scenes, but the keynote is the sort of detailed naturalism associated with Leigh's early films, and with northern European art (a tradition towards which Mr Turner nods). So the film sets up an interesting dialogue between the transcendental paintings and the all too mortal flesh that produced them. It's a materialist portrait of a man who painted angels. The death mask of the painter on display in the Late Turner—Painting Set Free exhibition at Tate Britain testifies to the accuracy of Leigh's study of deterioration. It's so gaunt it made me think of the old man in Shakespeare, “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”. Contemporary critics were quick—as both film and exhibition catalogue show—to connect the painter's physical decline to a falling off of his art. Turner had always been ridiculed for his “intoxicated” style, his “lurid” colours, and “obscurity”. After 1835, when the artist turned 60, critics diagnosed in his works the “infirmities of old age”. “Have his eyes been put out by the glare of his own colours?” There were darker suggestions too that the “frenzied” freedom of the late style finally unmasked inherited insanity—there had once been method in Turner's madness, but no more. “Ageism” coloured these criticisms. In the early 19th century old age and disease were synonymous, and “dotage” believed to commence at age 60 years. In capitalist industrial England utility was one of the cardinal virtues, and work a strenuous duty which the elderly found difficult to perform. The Romantic poets didn't help with their celebration of childhood as the phase when the doors of perception were open, the “vision splendid” fading with age. There arose a cult of precocious natural genius, which had helped burnish the reputation of the young Turner as the boy wonder of English art. Late Turner aims to set the record straight. It showcases Turner's autumn and winter as seasons of lucidity and fruitfulness, which featured a late blossoming of his finest work. Its broader aim is to promote a positive image of older age, with an event on “Late Creativity” accompanying the show. (For all its gritty realism Mr Turner also espouses “grey pride”, offering ample evidence that there was plenty of creative and sexual life left in the old sea dog in his seventies.) The Tate show celebrates Turner's vitality: his energy glows on the exhibition's walls like a sun bursting through the haze of one of his own canvases. On display are more than 150 works, representing only a fraction of the painter's multifarious production during his last 16 years. Here are oils on canvases of assorted sizes, watercolours on paper of diverse colours, and plein-air sketches which Turner dashed off during his many travels. Turner lost none of his appetite for experiment with age. In his late sixties he began using a small square support for a series of revolutionary twinned canvases in round, square, and octagonal formats. With their centrifugal compositions, prismatic colours, and mystical motifs works such as Light and Colour/Shade and Darkness make postmodern “spin paintings” look insubstantial and old-fashioned. They were so ahead of their own time that baffled reviewers said they might as well be hung upside down. Mercifully for Turner, many of the paintings in the show's final room were not exhibited in his lifetime; otherwise critics might have clamoured for him to be carted him off to Bedlam. In Norham Castle the artist “set painting free” by dissolving form into colour, and transforming colour into pure light, to arrive at that near abstraction and proto-impressionism which have made him one of the most influential English painters in art history. Wandering and wondering around this iridescent cave of mist and mystery is a synaesthetic experience. The light sings. Throughout the exhibition you marvel at the economy of means with which Turner captured the variety of a natural scene. Gusto was always his guiding principle, energy his eternal delight. With a few vigorous brushstrokes, forceful daubs of oil, or scratches of his palette knife, he conjured up vast and variegated land and seascapes. His trademark indistinctness and indeterminacy draws you in. It's up to you to finish Turner's pictures, momentarily fixing in your mind their fleeting forms, gazing intently at the dance of light and shade until the colour shines through. The experience is exhilarating, when it isn't overwhelming. I defy anyone to look at Snow Storm—Steam Boat off a Harbour's Mouth without feeling seasick. Here Turner flings no more than a handful of hints in your face—masses of alternating darks and lights, parallel sets of visible brushstrokes, four clashing colours driven across a grey ground. And yet, as you stare on, images emerge and start to move. The horizon tilts, and you glimpse the outline of a ship; vortices of sea spray and snow rise and fall, and waves race across the canvas. You'll know the work is complete when the nausea kicks in. Turner's “impressionist” suggestiveness and “expressionist” violence appalled reviewers, who called Snow Storm a smudge of “soapsuds and whitewash”. Its veracity was as shocking as its novelty. Here, and in many of the works that followed, the artist achieved a truthfulness way beyond the reach of contemporary photography or Pre-Raphaelite verisimilitude. Cocking a snook at fashionable realism, Turner painted what he felt as well as what he saw. Aiming straight at the imagination, he deliberately bypasses the intellect. This is the kind of art which demands participation not analysis. In his tumultuous oils Turner's exuberant temperament embodies the ferocious energy of the natural world. In many of the watercolours on show he instead turns the volume down. Here delicate brushstrokes and imperceptible gradations of translucent colour exemplify nature's evanescence and mutability. The images of Venice abound in ephemeral effects, as light and shadow move gently across surfaces of rippling water and stone. Whether in tempestuous or mellow mode, Turner never sees nature as “still life”; it is in a continual process of becoming which his art reproduces rather than represents. That's one of the reasons why his images still seem fresh, the paint barely dry. I left Late Turner with an eye attuned to the beauties of nature, and utterly convinced of the curators' thesis. Far from being a “cracked pot” and a spent creative force at the age of 60, Turner was compos mentis, and just about to get into his artistic stride. By 1835 he had gained full awareness of his limitations and the limitations of his medium, along with the confidence to overcome them. He no longer translated his thoughts into paint via the dictionary of artistic convention, but thought in it directly, with a radical liberty. Time may have “made sad work” of Turner's body, as he himself complained during his painful crawl towards death, but it also brought understanding and experience. Those qualities may not count for much today when youth is fetishised and older people too often disregarded. In art, however, as this dazzling exhibition shows, they are everything. Mr Turner A film by Mike Leigh. Sony Pictures Classics, 2014. http://sonyclassics.com/mrturner/ Mr Turner A film by Mike Leigh. Sony Pictures Classics, 2014. http://sonyclassics.com/mrturner/ Mr Turner A film by Mike Leigh. Sony Pictures Classics, 2014. http://sonyclassics.com/mrturner/ The EY Exhibition: Late Turner—Painting Set Free Tate Britain, London, UK, until Jan 25, 2014 http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/ey-exhibition-late-turner-painting-set-free The EY Exhibition: Late Turner—Painting Set Free Tate Britain, London, UK, until Jan 25, 2014 http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/ey-exhibition-late-turner-painting-set-free The EY Exhibition: Late Turner—Painting Set Free Tate Britain, London, UK, until Jan 25, 2014 http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/ey-exhibition-late-turner-painting-set-free