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Turner’s “Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth” © Tate Photography |
I have had a somewhat worshipful attitude toward the work of J.M.W. Turner ever since I saw the Grand Palais’s 2004 “Turner-Whistler-Monet” exhibition, which documented …
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Turner’s “Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth” © Tate Photography |
I have had a somewhat worshipful attitude toward the work of J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) ever since I saw the Grand Palais’s 2004 “Turner-Whistler-Monet” exhibition, which documented the influence of Turner’s revolutionary Impressionistic-long-before-Impressionism paintings on Monet. Many of my friends feel the same way about Turner, judging by the excitement in their voices when they mention the opening of “Turner and the Masters” (“Turner et les Peintres”), also at the Grand Palais.
How fascinating, then, to see this show and discover that Turner was a true artistic chameleon, changing colors and styles as soon as he smelled a whiff of sterling in the air. When Canaletto’s views of Venetian canals became fashionable, J.M.W. jumped on the gondola. The critics took a fancy to Rembrandt-style genre paintings? Turner made an appointment with a society dentist and was painting the interior of his office and his clients in high chiaroscuro in no time. One of his rivals was getting a lot of attention for a seascape he was painting for the Royal Academy show? Turner stole the limelight by finishing his own painting at the exhibition itself and, probably taking a cue from the competing work, added a red buoy to the foreground of his painting, the perfect finishing touch. The critics praised his work (beautiful in its simplicity) and laughed at the painting of his competitor hanging next to it.
All that may sound unsavory, but let’s not forget that artistic rivalry has a long and noble history, as we learned at the recent show at the Louvre documenting the paintbrush sparring of Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese and other artists in Renaissance Venice. And artists do have to make a living, after all. Turner just happened to be perhaps a bit more competitive and ambitious than most.
And, as this show makes very clear, Turner was a serious artist and craftsman who often bettered those he imitated. We see over and over again how he studied, copied and interpreted the works of the masters he most admired, among them Rembrandt, Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain. Poussin’s “Le Déluge” (“The Flood,” 1660-64) hangs next to Turner’s version, painted after he saw the original in 1802 at the Louvre. Turner retains the basic set-up, but eschews the perfection and prissiness of Poussin’s painting. In Turner’s “Flood” we feel the violence of the wind and water, and the desperate struggle of the drowning people, even while glimpsing a hint of hazy red sunset beyond the storm.
Many of his pastiches were less successful, however, especially those filled with figures – Turner was more at home with landscapes.
At the end of the exhibition, we get some examples of what seem to be the true Turner originals, the ones I love, paintings in which forms dissolve into pure light and movement, as in the brilliant “Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth” (pictured above). Turner explains in his lengthy subtitle that he was in the midst of the storm, watching the boat moving through it, and the viewer, too, is drawn into the wet, wild vortex of the squall.
Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais: 3, avenue du Général Eisenhower, 75008 Paris. Métro: Champs-Elysées Clemenceau. Tel.: 01 44 13 17 17. Open Friday-Monday, 9am-10pm; Tuesday, 9am-2pm; Wednesday, 10am-10pm; Thursday, 10 am-8 pm. Admission: €11. Through May 24, 2010. www.rmn.fr
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