"Not since V-J Day in Times Square has there been an equal tumult," The New York Times crowed during the last major American retrospective of J.M.W. Turner. The 1966 exhibition drew record crowds to the Museum of Modern Art, which presented the 19th-century British master of landscape painting, dead for more than a century, as a hero of the avant-garde.
This month, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., will stage the largest and most comprehensive Turner retrospective ever presented in the U.S. The exhibition includes 85 paintings on loan from Tate Britain and arrives in America after it was postponed two years ago owing to indemnity issues that involve its $1 billion-plus value. (It will move on to the Dallas Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2008.)
At first glance, Turner doesn't seem the type to warrant such hysteria. But the brooding and eccentric genius—sometimes adored, sometimes derided—seems ripe for another blockbuster, perhaps even a manic-depressive portrayal by Johnny Depp or Christian Bale (though by all accounts Turner was not an attractive fellow). At a moment when contemporary art has largely abdicated nature for the angst of nurture, Turner returns to remind us that there isn't anything quite as violent, chaotic, or sublime as the material world.
A child prodigy (he was admitted to the Royal Academy at 14), Turner was an expert draftsman who traveled through Europe recording catastrophe, the aftermath of battle, and the Industrial Revolution as if he were an embedded correspondent. He was a lifelong bachelor and an astute businessman who opened his own gallery at 29, amassing a fortune and prompting critics to add his prices to their list of grievances.
As he grew older Turner was increasingly obsessed with light and subsumed his subjects with atmospheric effects. Only the faintest of architectural details survive his crimson-and-yolk renderings of the burning of the Houses of Parliament. Slave Ship (which remains at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts), whose overthrown slaves are but squiggles and loops succumbing to color, brushstrokes, and walleyed fish, prompted William Thackeray to cry, "Is the picture sublime or ridiculous? Indeed, I don't know which."
In firmly detaching art from the banal concerns of reality and introducing the idea of the artist as a grand conjurer of experience and feeling, Turner opened an aesthetic Pandora's box and set off a chain reaction that can be traced from Monet straight through to the likes of Damien Hirst. Turner's big skies also struck a chord in America, where Frederic Church and the Hudson River School took over the mission of painting epic, expressive landscapes; Abstract Expressionists like Clyfford Still took it even further. And Jackson Pollock was not the first to be accused of simply displaying the detritus of house painters: Turner was hit with that brickbat back in 1841.
