Date: 10-04-1987
Owning Institution: Tate
Publication:     The Independent 1987 - 1999  
Subject:   19th Century    

WILLIAM HAZLITI once remarked that Turner's paintings were "pictures of nothing, and very like". He meant the late works — those vortices of light or primal oceanic upheavals that swirl in the roomful of late Turners at the Clore — and he meant it as an insult.

Since then modernism has intervened, and pictures of nothing are labelled abstract art. Recent years have seen a series of critical attempts to enlist late Turner as a modern artist stranded in the nineteenth century, a revolutionary whose visionary ideas — hampered by the prevailing pictorial and iconographie conventions — initiated a tradition that would culminate in the abstractions of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.

The new arrangement of the Turner Bequest reads like an extended argument against his modernity — both in the hanging of the paintings and, perhaps surprisingly, in the design of the exhibition space (it feels like a cross between Soane's nineteenth century Dulwich Art Gallery and the Yale Centre for British Art). In this classical, academic setting the pictures are accompanied by brief essays which explain Turner's often arcane iconography, point out his self-conscious imitations of the Old Masters, and quote the lines of poetry which he originally appended to his works when he showed them at the Royal Academy. The Bay ofBaiae, with Apollo and Sibyl invites you to gaze past its two diminutive human protagonists into the lucid depths of an ideal landscape, the world turned to honey by Turner's sun, the sails of distant ships reflected in the clear expanse of a sea that stretches to infinity. The text on the wall transforms the picture from wistful travelogue into allegory, a moralising contrast between the unfading beauty of nature and the folly of human ambitions for    permanence. Turner's painting tempts you to put on sunglasses and bathe in its warm glow; his didacticism, backed to the hilt at the Clore, tells you to put on your reading glasses and pay attention to his references.

The exhibition never allows you to forget the paranoid literariness of this Cockney made good — the symbolic, mythological or historical associations with which he freighted his art. Facing each other down the central spine of the gallery, separated by some 50 yards and £200 million worth of paintings, hang his 1818 Field of Waterloo and 1842 The Opening of the Walhalla. The first is Turner's grim reflection on the horrors of war — the foreground is littered with dead or grieving figures, examples of his characteristically floppy, boneless humanity (he never could paint people), lit by the lurid glow of a burnt out landscape that flashes with the sporadic detonation of cannon fire. The second is his celebration of the resurgence of European culture, a gooey mess of paint in which you can just discern a congregation of worthies and the Bavarian temple of arts the picture was meant to commemorate. (Turner sent it to the Congress of European Art in Munich, where it was taken as a satirical insult, returned damaged, and was partly responsible for the fact that no public institution in Germany would purchase his work for over a hundred years.) Neither is a particularly fine painting, so you suspect they have been placed so prominently to make a point: to stress Turner's intellectual seriousness, to un-derline his lifelong engagement with the history and culture of his time.

There is a good case for this approach. Turner would have approved of the Clore's scholarly glosses on his pictures, and its eager promotion of minor works with grandiose intellectual pretensions. When he first entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1789, at the precocious age of 14, the pictorial hierarchy of the late eighteenth century still held sway: this was a kind of points system that ranged subject matter in a scale of descending importance, from "history" painting (narrative works treating religious or mythological subject matter) down through portraiture to still life and landscape, the lowest of the low. Throughout his life Turner sought to revise this hierarchy, to raise the status of landscape painting: his texts, his frequently awkward symbolism, all served to exculpate his art from the charge of being mere topography, mere depiction of the effects of nature. Turner would have been horrified by the suggestion that he was an Impressionist avant a lettre.

"Damn the man! how various he is," said Gainsborough of Reynolds, and so is Turner. Not just in the variety of moods and styles of which he was capable — anything from picturesque to sublime, from Titian to Ruysdael (you sometimes feel he wanted to be a one-man National Gallery, which, in a sense, he has now become) — but also in quality. Among the scores of genuine masterpieces at the Clore you find equivalent mediocrities, works that are only there because Turner couldn't sell them, and some outright failures. One scarred but beautifully painted seascape, its label explains, looks the way it does because Turner used it for years as a cat-flap. But one of the greatest arguments for having a whole gallery devoted to the work of a single artist lies in its ability to accommodate the lesser works — paintings which are often as revealing as the accepted masterpieces.

One great failure at the Clore is his late Interior at Petworth. A failure, that is, as a depiction of a patrician dwelling, which Turner has painted instead as the site of some extraordinary, churning act of creation. In its infernal chaos of melted forms you can just make out the ghostly traces of architecture: the salon as super nova. In the same room, you find a more conventionally representational Petworth scene, the magnificent Petworth Park, Tillington Church in the Distance, with its plunging perspective leading into the heart of a majestic sunset. Pastoral English landscape is transformed, by Turner's ecstatic suffusions of glowing, incandescent light, into an uncannily stilled vision of Eden. Turner relocates divinity, hitherto the prerogative of religious painting — from Byzantine art to the Renaissance and beyond — in the secular tradition of landscape. Whether he actually said so or not, in his art the sun is God.

Turner's great theme is vanitas. Through all the avalanches, biblical deluges, snow- and sea-storms, blinding lights and darkling shades of his art, what comes through in the end is his elemental perception of the world — his sense that fire, earth, air and water are all that will endure. This is clearest of all in his unfinished works, the Rothko-like "colour beginnings" and those works-in-progress that hang (deliberately unframed) next to his completed Venetian paintings. The exhibition reminds you that these quasi-abstract works are incomplete, but by placing them next to finished paintings, it suggests his modernity. Turner would finish them — described by one of his contemporaries as "without form and void, like chaos before the creation" — on the walls of the Royal Academy, hours before the opening of the annual exhibition. Stepping in to create new worlds out of their indeterminate ether, Turner — in hubristic contrast to his theme of human insignificance — played God. He became the first action painter, predicting the improvisatory, and likewise cosmically ambitious, paintings of Pollock.

In Turner's unfinished works — shifting veils of paint, glowing and translucent at once — you find him freed from his cumbrous allegorical machinery, exploring an amorphous, abstract universe. In the late twentieth century, it is perhaps inevitable that they should appeal more than some of his more self-conscious finished works — like Wan the Exile and the Rock Limpet, with its clumsy cartoon-transfer Napoleon that turns a glorious sunset into the backdrop to a moralising aphorism.

Turner was too obsessed with the literary traditions of art historical precedent to be a modernist — but he was a divided artist, torn between his eloquence with paint and a compulsive, official need to fill his raging storms and becalmed voids with words. The Clore Gallery sides with the man of letters, but no amount of cross-referencing and beetle-browed explanation can destroy the revolutionary evidence that has been left by his brush.