J.M.W Turner- Understanding Modern Art

In 1832, on the eve of the Royal Academy summer exhibition, artists from all over England gathered in London for the tradition of Varnishing Day, an event where artists could add finishing touches to their works, see who the jury had given the best spots to and conversely whose work had been slighted with a poor hanging location. Among those present that year, and most years for that matter, was J. M. W. Turner, England's pre-eminent landscape painter. Turner, a long time member of the Academy, had on this occasion submitted a cool grey seascape, and was of course guaranteed a good spot. He was perhaps irked, however, to find his work had been hung right beside a particularly beautiful piece by John Constable, The Opening of Waterloo Bridge. Constable, another well regarded painter of the time, was also present, busy applying small flecks of vermilion to his scene, the fresh paint adding luminosity to his careful work. In contrast to Constable's vibrant efforts, Turner's own work seemed to pale somewhat, but rather than taking it in good nature, congratulating Constable on his success or generally reacting as a normal human being would in such circumstances, Turner left the room. He returned minutes later with a palette and a daub of red paint, which he began to smear onto the surface of his seascape. Working quickly and delicately, he shaped the lumpen carmine blob and upon his satisfaction declared it to be a boy, which it seems was just what the painting needed. The contrasting red lifted the greys of Turner's sea, shifting its delicate colour balance and making it pop. So the story goes, the room erupted into applause for Turner, eliciting declarations of his genius from those present, with the possible exception of Constable who probably had some other words to describe Turner in mind. This story tells us some interesting things about Turner both as a painter and as a man. For one thing, social etiquette and good sportsmanship seemingly meant very little to him. For another, it shows us that when it came to painting, he was indeed a genius. Turner's instantly recognisable works are often far beyond his times in both their methods and execution, and his atmospheric use of colour would inspire many who came after him, from the French Impressionists to the Abstract Expressionists. As a painter, he is perhaps one of the most influential figures in art history, and his at times shockingly prescient works make him another good candidate for being the father of modern art, or at the very least his distant uncle. So today, let's take a look at the life, times and works of J. M. W. Turner to see the impact of his paintings, and their many connections to the development of modern art. Joseph Mallard William Turner was born to humble beginnings in London in 1775. His father was a barber and wig maker, which must have been a roaring trade at the time, but the Turners were by no means an affluent family. Coming from a lower rung of the socio-economic ladder in class-obsessed 18th century England would have put some limits on what the young Turner could do with his life, if not for the fact that from an early age he displayed a keen ability to draw. So gifted was he that his father would place his drawings in the shop window and brag to his clients of his son's talents, which led to the young Turner earning money from his drawings at only 11 years of age. He took to painting skies and clouds for sale, as well as working for engravers producing copies of other artists' work and studying topographical drawing while working for architects. All of this the young Mallard took to like a duck to water, and soon his talents were brought to the Royal Academy's attention. Admitted to study at the age of just 14, which is quite unusual for any era, the young Turner was taken under the wing of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the head of the Royal Academy, and he gained much valuable insight from the older painter. He is however said to have got on less well with many of his peers, as the intensely private Turner was marked by not only professed awkwardness in public, but also by his low birth and thick Cockney accent, which the sort of company he was in looked down upon as vulgar. Nonetheless, the young Turner would stick to his studies and develop his talents over the next several years. During this time he mainly studied drawing, the only skill it was taught vital for a painter to have in those days. Turner's early paintings were mostly conducted on watercolour, which he had learned to use while producing architectural drawings, using it to add local colour and paint details using tonal scales of coloured washes. Turner would also use watercolours in his many notebooks to document the sights he saw on his Painting outdoors like this was still uncommon, impressionism was a ways off yet, but thanks to the technological advances of the day, such as the advent of watercolour cakes in 1781, Turner was among the early adopters of the practice. By the age of 21, Turner's studies were quite advanced, and he submitted his first finished work in oils, Fisherman at Sea, for the annual exhibition in 1796. The piece is a technical marvel following into the Dutch and British traditions of seascape and naval painting, as well as borrowing from the moonlit scenes of Joseph Wright of Derby. Its subject is a pair of boats adrift on a night-time sea near the Isle of Wight, which we can identify by the characteristic sea stacks in the background. The turbulent waters they sail upon rise up out of the darkness with a certain solidity that Turner no doubt internalised from all of that architectural practice he did. This dark scene is carefully lit by two light sources of contrasting temperature, the cold moonlight and the small warm glow of a lantern, giving it a sense of balance and an ephemeral air. The tonality of the work hints at Turner's rapidly developing powers as a painter, the bright lights are delicately balanced against the darks of the water to emphasise the fragility of the small boats against the great unknown on which they sail. Seascapes are considered quite a difficult genre to paint and night-time scenes are even more so, which makes us think that Turner may have been showing off here a bit. Showing off is of course not his only goal, the dark unknown of the sea at night and the fragility of the boats it tosses around are evocative of a key aesthetic concern of the era known as the sublime. Turner was, as many others were at the time, a bit of a romantic. Not so much in terms of being sentimental or love-lorn, more in the sense of rejecting enlightenment philosophy and questioning the supremacy of rationalism. Romantics reacted against the cold hard logic of enlightenment philosophy that had dominated European art and culture in prior decades, and in its place extolled many of the virtues we still associate with art today, such as individualism, creativity, emotional expression and, crucially for Turner, the supreme and frequently terrifying power of nature, often referred to as the sublime. The Irish statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke defined the sublime as a distinct form of beauty, one which unlike classical beauty we do not react to in terms of well-sized proportions, pleasing compositions or harmonious colours, but instead to a reaction based on fear evoked by senses of nature's magnitude, scale and power that dwarf our human existence. It's fun stuff, and many romantics in mediums from poetry to painting would explore this particular kind of aesthetic reaction as a distinction that set them apart from their more classical counterparts. Turner is no exception to this, and many of his works feature elements of the sublime. From vast landscapes to ferocious weather, the sublime, it seems, is never far from Turner's mind. A good example of this change in aesthetic emphasis, from the classic to the romantic, can be seen in Hannibal Crossing the Alps, Turner's vision of Hannibal's daring crossing, which was itself painted in response to another work, Jacques-Louis David's Napoleon Crossing the Alps, which mythologised Napoleon's own crossing of the Alps by the same route Hannibal had taken centuries before. Just by looking at these two works we can see some major differences between David's neoclassicism and Turner's more romantic style. In David's efforts, Napoleon is front and centre, up on his high horse and striking a heroic pose. The surface is clean and the composition orderly. It conveys a clear meaning, which is, Napoleon is class. A sentiment which Napoleon himself and his propagandists would no doubt have agreed with. Turner's efforts, which show us Hannibal's traversal being stopped by the sudden onset of a snowstorm, contrasts with David's in every way. Unlike David's heroic Napoleon, we can't even identify Hannibal here, and the figures we can see are dwarfed by the scale of the oncoming storm, through which the sun shines, giving the scene its trademark Turner light and atmosphere. Unlike David's clean and ordered surface, Turner's perhaps unorthodox working methods resulted in a surface that feels as chaotic as his subject matter, and one that shifts the emphasis away from the heroic depiction of a leader and towards the sublime power of nature. Those peculiar working methods certainly helped him to achieve this representation of the sublime. Unlike the ordered surface of a neoclassical painting with its smooth colours and imperceptible brushwork, Turner's methods were practically anarchic. He would build his paintings in layers, scrubbing on and rubbing off wash after wash of paint, using thick lumps of white to create areas of impasto, thick painterly texture, and glaze thin washes of colour over them to give glowing effects. Turner's methods were unique, though unfortunately there are very few accounts of his process, as the notoriously private painter refused to have anyone watch him work. One of the few accounts we do have comes from the son of a patron who asked Turner to paint him a picture of a ship. He recalls Turner taking a sheet of paper and soaking it in watercolour, before beginning to scrape and scrub and lash on paint until, at last, from the chaos of a morning's work, an image emerged. Such methods would have seemed quite barbaric at the time. Many of Turner's critics would attack him as a influence on future generations for not following proper technique, though considering the often spectacular results, I'd say we can let him away with it. If you would like to know more about Turner's techniques, I will direct you to the excellent Tom Keating, painter, forger, socialist and all-around enemy of the art market, who made a series of films explaining how he had forged the works of many masters, including Turner, that fooled the experts for years. I'll link a video down below where he demonstrates his version of Turner's process that does a great job of explaining exactly how Turner made his spectacular works. Turner's unusual working methods, distinct style and natural talents would bring him great professional success. His family life was unfortunately less harmonious. He had a sister, but she died quite young, and his mother, of whom we know little, was said to have suffered from mental problems, which, given the era, could have been anything from full-blown schizophrenia to asking for the right to vote. She was committed to the notorious Bedlam Asylum where she died in 1804, after which the eternally private Turner never spoke of her again. His last living family member, his father, eventually closed his barber shop and came to live with his successful son, to act as his live-in carer and assistant. Turner was quite close to his father, and after he passed away in 1829, the artist would become ever more eccentric and withdrawn from public life. Unlike his personal life, his public perception was quite the opposite, only improving as he got older. His increasingly abstract later works were at first received poorly by the critics, as it seems is always the case, but this would change over time thanks to the advocacy of John Ruskin, the influential writer and critic who saw Turner as the best of English painting and fought his corner critically for decades. With Ruskin's backing, his by now long-standing connections to the Royal Academy and his undeniable talents, Turner would become known as the top painter of his day, and his later works would increasingly push at the established boundaries of painting and even representation itself. These later works are where the atmosphere and light we have come to associate with Turner today becomes most notable. Over time, he freed himself from the solidity of that early architectural training and began to paint with an unmatched looseness. These canvases can at times recede into pure colour, with only hints of half-formed natural subjects lit by amazing depictions of the sun itself, a frequent motif in his works. The varying brightness and darkness of his colours, played against one another to create harmonies and contrasts, is another hallmark of Turner to which the vivid brilliance of many of his works can be attributed. Tone, as many artists will tell you, is key to making believable works. Usually broken down into a sequence of steps from dark to light, three tones can show a form, five can render it effectively, while nine can do so photorealistically. Tones in Turner's work by contrast could well be found in the hundreds. His observance of the qualities of natural light led him to develop a keen eye for tonal balance, that he used to represent the nuances of nature and natural light quite evocatively. In the process he abandoned many of the conventions of painting of his day and at times approached elements of abstraction. Many of these later works seem to anticipate developments in painting still over a century away, and in many ways Turner seems to have been a bit of a canary in a coal mine for the changes that modernisation would bring, which were just getting started in his day. Turner documented many of the historical events of his era, such as the fire that ravaged Westminster Abbey in 1834, which he enthusiastically painted as it was happening. The most dramatic events he captured however, happened more gradually, and over the course of his career we can see more and more traces of the industrial revolution creeping in. Many romantics were suspicious of the new factories and railways, their love of nature placing them in natural opposition to developments that they felt were rapidly destroying it. Turner by contrast acts as an enthusiastic chronicler of the changes in this era. Perhaps it was his lifelong fascination with ships central to the British mindset as a naval power, or maybe it was the scientific populism of the day which saw scientists entertain the educated gentry with flashy experiments that showed the power of the approaching modern era. Whatever it was, Turner was pretty on board for the whole industrialisation thing, which we can see in many of his later works, where his interest in the sublime power of nature finds new expression in the sublime power of industry. Rain, Speed and Steam is one such example of this, depicting a train crossing the Maidenhead Bridge over the Thames in London. As the title implies, this is an image of industrial speed and power depicting the new development of the railways, the first of which had only begun operating in 1838, some six years prior to this works creation. The black form of the train shoots out of the canvas, almost coming towards us, emerging out of a characteristically atmospheric Turner backdrop. There are very few details in this scene, but the rain mentioned in the title softens and melts our view, shrouding everything in a mist of gold, blue and brown. This painting may seem somewhat minimal compared to the detailed scenes of other romantics or earlier works by Turner himself, but it does something that those other works don't. It conveys a sense of the speed, power and force of the modernity. The train and the hitherto unseen speeds at which it travelled through the English countryside, as well as the stone and brick bridge built to carry its enormous weight indicate this, and Turner's loose atmospheric depiction of them emerging from this rainstorm equates that power with the power of nature itself. For Turner it seems, the sense of the sublime has shifted from the natural world to the new wonders of industry. This interpretation can of course be read in many ways, depending on your point of view regarding industrialisation, and one inclusion which demonstrates this is the rabbit which runs, just a hair's breadth if you will, ahead of the train. So small you may well not notice it, it runs just ahead of the train, perhaps symbolising speed itself, nature's flight from the incursions of man, or maybe just an unlucky animal in a very bad spot who is most certainly experiencing a sense of the industrial sublime first hand. Another well known work by Turner that demonstrates this sense of an industrial sublime in a slightly more melancholic fashion is the fighting Temeraire towed to her last birth to be broken up, which can be seen as symbolising the end of an era and the beginning of a new one. The scene is based on an event that Turner once again witnessed himself, the Temeraire was one of the last ships to have participated in the battle of Trafalgar in 1805, and now having reached the end of its life, Turner witnessed it being towed down the river to be broken up by a new steam powered tugboat. Turner takes quite a few liberties in this composition, for one it was daytime rather than evening when he saw it, for another there were two tugboats rather than one. Most tellingly is the Temeraire itself, which was missing its masks when Turner saw it, already in the process of decommissioning. In the painting Turner returns the Temeraire to its full glory, painting a ghost of the ship in its full regalia that evokes the glory of its heyday. This ephemeral vision is being pulled along by the squat black form of a steam powered tugboat, which despite being small in comparison to the contrastingly extravagant Temeraire nonetheless chugs on, unperturbed by the weight it carries. The tugboat becomes symbolic of the new era and the power of its advances over the heights of the old. The image of the Temeraire becomes a sentimental goodbye to the days of old and perhaps even the British Empire itself, though Turner as a typically patriotic Englishman would probably have denied this. The setting sun and the rising moon behind the Temeraire reinforce these themes of the end of an era, which Turner like many others at the time could not deny, for the days of ships like Temeraire were most definitely in the past as the age of steam was dawning. Turner's depictions of industrialisation are as nuanced as his paintings of nature, and they offer us a look at the attitudes of his era towards the new modern advances. They show us optimism for the speed and power of the future, as well as tinges of melancholy for the times that are now past. But crucially, Turner never laments these changes. To him, unlike many other romantics, these visions of the future are to be embraced rather than denied. Turner died in 1851, still a long way off from the worst effects of the Industrial Revolution that really wouldn't make themselves clear until the following century. But the work that he left that documents the changes he lived through would shape a huge amount of our aesthetic attitudes towards industry and progress going forwards. The shifting of the romantic notion of the sublime onto new technology, for example, is one of the outcomes of Turner's thinking that I reckon is still with us today. In a much more direct way for the arts, Turner would have a legacy that is very important to that whole modern art thing that I swear I'm getting around to. In 1870, two Frenchmen we may already be familiar with, Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro, would flee one of the by then semi-regular revolutions in Paris, and head for the relative safety of London. While there, they saw the works of Turner and were inspired by his recordings of light and atmosphere, his attention to the moment, and his skill at transcribing the ephemeral qualities of nature. Turner would become a cornerstone inspiration for the Impressionists, his influence would help them in their endeavours to create artworks that reflected a world forever changed by those industrial advances that were only getting started in his day. But that's not all, I wasn't exaggerating when I said Turner was a thoroughly modern painter, in many ways even more modern than the Impressionists were, as many subsequent painters such as Mark Rothko have cited Turner and his strong colours and tempestuous brushwork as an inspiration for their own work, and much later movements such as Abstract Expressionism. Works like Rothko's in particular often come under heavy criticism for their perceived lack of content, but having seen how Turner's work developed over time and the amazing power his paintings achieved by abandoning conventionality rather than remaining stymied in observance of past rituals, may give us some indication of his importance to abstract painters like Rothko. Turner, as we said earlier, is another suspect in the search for the father of modern art, and we will see his influence in many painters who came after him, demonstrating in all the dadge that Turner is the painter's painter. I've been really encouraged by all the support and the nice comments, to continue on with this and keep going, so the plan for the next year will be to cover roughly the period between 1900 and 1950, so we've come from the Impressionists and all these French lads, and we're going to work our way up towards Abstract Expressionism. I reckon that's a pretty good chunk of history to cover, so there's a lot of stuff in there, I've been doing a rake of research and getting all my ducks in a row for it, so over the next year you can look forward to videos on Dada, Surrealism, Suprematism, Expressionism, all the isms, you know the sort of stuff. Some people have been asking are we only going to be covering artists from the modern era, and the answer is no, we will still be covering people from prior centuries and whatnot. There's still a load of lads that I haven't covered that are still important in many ways to modern art, we'll probably have to be stepping back to cover some of them while we continue on with the 20th century, sure we'll be seeing how it goes. Anyway sure that's the lay of the land as it stands now, thanks again, if you like what we're doing sure subscribe, like, comment, share, whatever it is, they're always telling you to do these things, and if you really like what we're doing you can help us out by donating on buymeacoffee.com. So thanks again and I'll see you in the next one.