Turner the Monarch

Abstract

Turner the Monarch Donald Stone (bio) David Solkin, ed., Turner and the Masters. Tate Publishing, 2009. Illustrated. 240 pages. $55. No British artist aside from Shakespeare has served more eloquently as England’s cultural ambassador than Joseph Mallord William Turner. Probably only Picasso, in recent years, has been the subject of more international exhibitions. When China opened its door to western influences in the early 1980s, among the first art exhibitions sent to Beijing were a hundred major French paintings from the Louvre and one exhibit from England devoted to a single painter, Turner. In 2009 after the corporate sponsor of a major Turner show held in America was unable to fund the exhibition’s transfer to Beijing, the British government came up with the money. During my student days the most revealing Turner exhibition was the one curated by Lawrence Gowing for the Museum of Modern Art (1966), which revealed his kinship with such contemporary American abstract painters as Mark Rothko. For the great bicentenary Turner exhibition held in 1975 at the London Royal Academy, pride of place was given to three stunning works owned by American museums: The Slave Ship (Ruskin’s favorite Turner) from the Boston Museum, The Burning of the Houses of Parliament from [End Page 167] Philadelphia, and (for me, Turner’s supreme masterpiece) Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight from Washington. And now we have the handsome catalogue, edited by David Solkin and a team of Turner scholars, for another landmark exhibition, Turner and the Masters, traveling between London (Tate Britain, September 2009 to January 2010), Paris (Grand Palais, February to May 2010), and Madrid (Prado, June to September 2010). In this most scholarly of the Turner exhibitions so far, the artist is examined in the context of the painters he most admired—Titian, Claude, Rembrandt, and Watteau, among others—to see how he stands up to the greatest masters of European art. Coincidentally the Grand Palais had hosted a year earlier a disappointing exhibition of Picasso et les Maîtres, revealing the Spanish artist’s insatiable and overreaching desire to cannibalize his predecessors (Velazquez, Rembrandt, Goya, etc). Turner, by contrast, approached the old masters with reverence. He gauged his own developing talents as an artist by his capacity to learn from them and become their associate, not their superior. Turner’s upbringing was humble compared to Picasso’s; while the latter’s father was a painter and art teacher, Turner’s father was a barber, whose shop lay not far from the Royal Academy’s headquarters at Somerset House. A precocious young artist, who began exhibiting watercolors at the Royal Academy at the age of fifteen, Turner never lost his sense of humility. It is inconceivable to imagine his painting a self-portrait like Picasso’s Yo, Picasso at age twenty; only once did Turner depict his own features. But it is also hard to imagine Picasso bursting into tears, as Turner did, at the sight of a work by his idol, Claude. In his excellent essay for the Turner catalogue at hand, “Stolen Hints from Celebrated Pictures,” Ian Warrell (who curated the recent American Turner exhibition) observes that while Picasso “most often turned to the Old Masters at times of stylistic transition or crisis,” Turner made them his lifelong companions, whose works contained “undiminished relevance to Turner’s idea of himself as an artist.” As an alumnus of the Royal Academy, Turner responded all his life to the advice of its president, Sir Joshua Reynolds, in the famous Discourses to the art students: “Study nature attentively, but always with those masters in your company; consider them as models which you are to imitate, and at the same time as rivals with whom you are to contend.” As André Malraux noted in The Voices of Silence, “Every artist starts off with the pastiche,” but Royal Academy students were in danger of being overwhelmed by the academy’s promotion of the Grand Style. In their useful catalogue entry on “The Academy and the Grand Style,” Philippa Simpson and Martin Myrone describe the “hierarchy of genres” laid out for the students: with “history painting . . . which presented noble human actions taken from distinguished historical or literary...