J.M.F. Turner’s Staffa, Fingal’s Cave (1832)

I made a dual purpose visit to Dallas, Texas recently, for the annual meeting with my tax advisor and – much more pleasurably – a visit to the much-anticipated J.M.W. Turner exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art. The show is billed as “the largest and most comprehensive Turner retrospective ever presented in the United States,” with many works never before shown in the US. I’ve admired Turner all my life and looked forward to this show. I wasn’t disappointed.

For me, Turner had been exciting seascapes and highly impressionistic landscapes with yellow troubled skies. Then came the remarkable Turner and Venice exhibition presented at the Kimbell Museum in Ft. Worth in 2004. The big oils of famous vistas in Venice were stunning but even more enlightening were the dozens of watercolors done by Turner as preparation. The imagination and technique on display in these modest works left one in awe of how a gifted artist can grasp the essence of the perceptible world in just a few strokes of a brush. And now in 2008 three museums – New York, Washington and Dallas – have collaborated to bring 150 major Turner paintings to American art lovers.

Ed Voves in the California Literary Review called this show a “once in a lifetime exhibition” and so it was. To come upon a room dominated by “The Battle of Trafalgar”, “The Shipwreck”, “Snowstorm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps”, or “The Burning of the House of Lords and Commons” – the latter accompanied as in the Turner and Venice show by a series of extraordinary small watercolors on the same subject – is to be struck dumb by the power of Turner’s vision and the craft that enabled him to express what he saw in paints and brushes. And who can forget the harrowing “Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying”?

This exhibition also reminded me that Turner had a more conventional side. I still find it strange that such a visionary could turn out very elaborate but ultimately traditional paintings based on episodes in Greek history and mythology and inspired by Claude Lorrain. Some of these paintings were on show in Dallas too, along with seemingly endless English country scenes in the manner of Constable. 

This pandering to the conventional suggests, to me at any rate, that Turner was human like the rest of us – and liked to eat regularly! Mozart comes to mind as another creative artist who quickly produced one ‘conventional’ work after another to earn a living. For Turner and Mozart one might say that creating was breathing. Did they mind dipping back into tradition? Perhaps not, for sooner or later the opportunity would present itself to allow them to stretch a little or, on occasion, a lot.

What kind of man was this J.M.W. Turner? A singularly unattractive one, by all accounts and a very private and eccentric one too. He never married but maintained a flat under an assumed name and had two mistresses in succession over his lifetime, both of whom gave him children.

It was also discovered after his death, that Turner had produced some erotic art; to my knowledge these paintings have never been publicly exhibited – they were certainly nowhere to be seen in the Dallas show.

My favorite Turner story is an account of how he worked on so-called ‘varnishing days’, the traditional lead-up to public exhibitions for painters in his time. Most painters would simply add some varnish to their work after it was hung for public viewing. Turner would hang his paintings in the gallery and to the astonishment of his colleagues virtually all his canvasses were unfinished. But in a matter of hours of intensive work, scarcely ever turning away from his canvas, Turner would finish the paintings as a kind of master class for his no doubt disheartened colleagues. What technique and what confidence!

Turner (1775-1851) was a contemporary of both Beethoven (1770-1827) and Mendelssohn (1809-1847). Like Beethoven he grew up in the Classical Period and like Mendelssohn he lived to be a Romantic too. Like Beethoven he learned his craft under the rather severe constraints of classical models but he gradually was able to move with the flow of the new wave of subjectivity and individualism. Mendelssohn’s “Hebrides” or “Fingal’s Cave” Overture (1830) gives a vivid musical expression of the mysterious caves off the western coast of Scotland. Turner captured the same natural wonder two years later in his oil painting “Staffa, Fingal’s Cave” (1832). Turner combines his characteristic rolling sea and troubled sky with the famous cave in the distance seen through an impressionistic haze. And it is so characteristic of Turner that he includes a steamship struggling against the treacherous waves; this is not a welcoming place for mere mortals.

As an avid train buff, I must confess another Turner predilection that appeals to me: he was one of the first artists to find inspiration in railroads and trains. One of his most famous and iconic paintings is “Rain, Steam and Speed- the Great Western Railway” (1844). In this work Turner goes beyond romanticism to encompass the Industrial Revolution as a fact of modern life. Turner clearly embraces the future and he does it in a form of expression that is even more forward-looking. Turner has taken a physical thing representative of the latest in modern technology and expressed it in a haze of forms, feelings, colors and textures – that is to say, Impressionism, the new creative world of Monet, Renoir and Pissarro that was still years away.

J. M. W. Turner runs at the DMA until May 18 and then heads for its final stop on this tour, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

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