Alastair Sooke： the JMW Turner painting that launched modern art

Tate Britain's new exhibition, Lake Turner, is devoted to the final phase of Turner's career. It begins in 1835 when he turned 60 and it ends in 1850 when he exhibited for the last time at the Royal Academy, just a year before his death. And it's big, there are 180 works in the show, but I want to talk about just one and it's this painting here, Norham Castle Sunrise. Now Norham Castle, south of Berwick in Northumberland, it was very important for Turner. He depicted it several times during his career and it was so important for him that the final time he visited it in 1831 he actually bowed to the castle as though in respect. But this dates from a little later, around about 1845, and it's often taken as an archetypal work when people think about Lake Turner, the style of his final years, because by then his paint has become very free, very loose. The actual forms and details seem to have dissolved in light. So what you see here is this silhouetted blue castle, which is very pale blue, it's quite ghostly as though it's dissolving before our eyes. Behind it you've got this great fireball of yellow, the sun rising up so that the canvas feels like it's glowing, light is coming out at us. And then in the foreground, this detail I love, this cow in some umber tones with a sort of reflection beneath which gives the whole piece a very impalpable, insubstantial, airy, fantastical quality. It's though this could be watery rather than level ground. And the distinction between the sort of horizon line and where the sky begins is blurred, everything's blurred and indistinct. It gives it a very hazy, poetical, really quite beautiful quality. But part of the point of this exhibition is to make us interrogate how we've come to understand works like this, because in the 20th century people looked at Norman Castle's Sunrise and said, aha, Turner, he is the forerunner of modern art. Outer paintings like this you can see impressionism, you can see abstraction. But the curators of the show at the Tate want us to think again, because you know what, this could actually just not be finished. It is quite experimental and ultimately it's probably anachronistic to start casting onto Turner future art movements that he knew absolutely nothing about. At the same time, it does always make me think of this wonderful anecdote about Mark Rothko. He saw some works by Turner, the final works of his career, in a show in New York in 1966 and afterwards supposedly he said, that Turner, he learned a lot from me.