England's Greatest Romantic

By ROBERT HUGHES

In scale, in scope, in sheer excellence, the Royal Academy's retrospective of the works of Joseph Mallord William Turner (which runs until March 2, 1975) is the most important art exhibition held in either England or the U.S. in the past five years. Two hundred years have passed since Turner was born in a cellar in Maiden Lane and his reputation has never ceased to grow. In this show, it gets its due from an institution that Turner always regarded with filial piety. There are 650 oils, watercolors, prints and drawings on view, too many to see in one day. In their range--from the earliest imitative watercolors of picturesque scenery, through the imitations of Claude, the French landscapist, the seascapes, the Italian scenes, and so on to the Beethoven-like grandeur of the last landscapes--they form the best pos sible introduction to this coarsely explicit but mysterious Englishman.

Vast Range. Turner's was not a "normal" life but a long exertion. He had little art training. His father, a Covent Garden wigmaker, exploited him, egging him on to turn out hundreds of bread-and-butter illustrations. His mother died mad, which seems to have inhibited Turner from trusting women; for sex he went to dockside whores, and for security and approval he turned to an institution, the Royal Academy. Nearly all his emotional energies were displaced into his work. Its sheer volume was astounding: the British Museum alone has 19,000 watercolors, color notes and travel drawings. Turner's creativity, which rivaled Picasso's, meant ceaseless travel in search of motifs--over the Alps, around Italy, across France, throughout England. But the work remained in England. Thus the Royal Academy had a vast range of work to choose from, and it is hardly possible that a better Turner show can ever be mounted. It is a triumph of scholarship and taste, but especially it is a triumph for Turner and, in a way, for his country; for it now seems not only that Turner was the greatest artist England ever produced, but that the most profound romantic artist in 19th century Europe was an Englishman.

Nobody could be less like the French romantics than was Turner, with his cobbled-to-gether education, his stinginess and gruff bearing. But no 19th century painter, not even Cezanne, has changed our perception of landscape more radically. This is an opportune show, coming as it does when American formalism is dead and an interest in content is reviving. For Turner was a master of meaning, and to see him as a modern artist (which he was) means leaving the formalist hierarchies on one side.

Another aspect of Turner that now seems so prophetic was his freedom of technique. There were witnesses to it, for Turner was apt to leave his big Academy pieces unfinished until varnishing day and then, hunched close in a trance of concentration for hours at a time like a stumpy, irritable macaw, would complete them in the gallery where they hung. One colleague remembered how "the picture when sent in was a mere dab of several colors, and 'without form and void,' like chaos before the creation." The handling of paint, the stuff itself--squidgy or crumbly or liquid, applied with every instrument from the finest sable brush to his own horny thumb--was of immense importance to Turner. The structure of paint in his mature work, the gouts of impasto overlaid by veil upon veil of glazes, transparencies and flecks, is not merely a description of the movement of wind, light and water: it becomes an equivalent to that movement translated into the motions of the hand.

With Turner, for the first time since Leonardo, movement becomes a painter's primary subject. Turner was the first painter of landscape to perceive--and find a visual language to embody his perception--that nature is composed not of objects acting upon one another in a mechanical way but of fields of force. The earth's atmosphere, which earlier painters had treated as a limpid and neutral fluid, was now endowed with an awesome particularity--swaths of energy, turbulence and vibrating light, arches of cloud and rain, endless halls of vapor and transparency. The sea for centuries had been conventionalized as a flat sheet or, when shown in a storm, with generally stylized patterns of movement; yet to Turner it revealed equally vast and specific structures, sucking and toppling. By 1803, when he came to paint Calais Pier, Turner possessed an insight into the real motions and energies of water whose only parallel was in Leonardo.

Grand Catastrophes. Why no landscapist had done this before is a mystery. It may be that land and vegetation came to be perceived before either sky or sea because land can be possessed, but air and water were (at the time) dangerous, beyond ownership. In any event, Turner's claim to originality of vision is absolute. Furthermore, it was based on his experience. But Turner had a leather belly and, blessed with immunity to seasickness, he endured all weathers. In one terrible storm off Harwich, he recalled, "I got the sailors to lash me to the mast to observe it. I was lashed for four hours, and I did not expect to escape; but I felt bound to record it if I did." The result was Snowstorm--Steamboat off a Harbor's Mouth: that devouring vortex of exquisitely modulated energy which, seen at the Royal Academy in 1842, was derided by critics as "soapsuds and whitewash."

Turner, despite his taciturn and obstinate gruffness, could be pricked to tears by a stupid notice. "Soapsuds and whitewash!" he complained to Ruskin. "I wonder what they think the sea's like? I wish they'd been in it!" Turner's most Leonardesque aspect was the deep pessimism that went with his long investigation of nature. In the works of his maturity, human life is merely an eddy in elemental time. His love of full-bore catastrophe is indicated by the most Turneresque of all his titles, an Alpine scene: Snowstorm, Avalanche and Inundation (1837). But the painted results of his pessimism were of an indescribable grandeur and poignancy. He was rooted in his own time and society. Moreover, he was sure that that society--optimistic, promethean England with its empire and its burgeoning industrial revolution, now rising from its triumph over Bonaparte--was in fact on the edge of collapse. This is implicit in Turner's Venetian paintings, where the fretted and tottering profiles of the once omnipotent city melt (so ravishingly, and with such implied finality) into their last erosion by light and water.

Paintings of contemporary events were also dense with allegorical meaning. Among these was Turner's Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 1835 (see color page). This apocalyptic moment, for so it seemed to Londoners already made nervous by Chartist labor agitation, happened one October night in 1834, and Turner, rushing from dinner with sketchbook in hand, was there to see it. When the House of Lords collapsed, "Bright coruscations, as of electric fire, played in the great volume of flames," and the throng of watchers on the Thames' embankments broke into applause, "as though they had been present at the closing scene of some dramatic spectacle," as indeed, in Turner's view, they had: What more vivid image of the punishment of English hubris could he have asked for? All Turner is in his view of the conflagration: it is the essence of his delight in elemental conflict--fire raging in the clear mirror of water, its ruddy glow drifting west across a night sky cool as china.

Historical Fumes. Martin Butlin, keeper of the British Collection at the Tate Gallery, points out in the catalogue that Turner's cataclysms were meant to replace the older European tradition of personified myth--wrathful Zeus and so forth--and thus they moralize nature itself. Turner, a self-taught man, was no classical scholar, and he made blunders of erudition about myth and history. Yet as Butlin puts it, "Turner's moral philosophy was a matter of passion and visual expression, not of strict archaeology and attention to sources . . . The fumes of history filled his brain, not its dry facts." When the fumes wove in harmony with the demands of visual truth, Turner became an epic dramatist--as Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus shows, with that sublime apparition of a galleon, canvas flapping and looping, escorted by Nereids through a lake of fire and vapor, under the dimly discernible, looming profile of the giant.

But toward the end of Turner's life, the flow of myth and history subjects abated as he went deeper than any earlier painter had gone into the structure of color. At Petworth, enjoying the relaxed and eccentric patronage of Lord Egremont, he produced paintings like Music Party, Petworth: its forms dissolving in a bath of russet light would look extreme for Monet in 1895, let alone in England 60 years earlier. In the last landscapes, the world of detail and substance has been fully absorbed into the vibration of light, pure self-delighting energy manifesting itself. Except for Blake's, they are the most religious paintings of the 19th century. They are wholly Apollonian. One understands why, after Turner died in 1851, the story got about that his last words were "The Sun is God."

.Robert Hughes

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