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Art History
"So I'm to become a nobody, right?" These words, attributed to the seventy-six years old Joseph Mallord William Turner on his deathbed, offers a revealing view of the vault of the ambition that fed his long and controversial career. For over six decades This painter born to humble circumstances worked hard to establish and maintain its reputation as the greatest painter in Britain. As one walks through the twelve Super showrooms Turner National Gallery, the largest of its kind ever presented in North America, recognizes an artist whose imaginative vision and innovative techniques to expand the artistic possibilities of light and color in the nineteenth century. Turner also had a remarkable "second life" in the mid-century XX, when his late unfinished works were rediscovered by both the Abstract Expressionists and experimental filmmakers.
Turner was an unlikely candidate for the title the best British artist of his time. His father was a barber and wig maker who showed the pictures of her precocious son in the window of his store in Convent Garden. Shortly after enrolling as a student at the Royal Academy in 1790, Turner acknowledged that getting attention in the Academy's annual exhibition was a necessity if he was to rise from ranges. Since then, his ruling passion was inextricably linked to the stated intention of the Academy to develop a unique school of British painting. In 1802, at the age of twenty-six, he was elected full academic Real – the youngest member ever admitted to that quality. Five years after this honor Turner looked for another. He was professor of perspective in which capacity he delivered a series of conferences in most years from 1811 to 1.828. The ignorant, but intellectual curiosity Turner struggled in their conferences to present their innovative ideas visually in the diagrams. He maintained a lifelong devotion to the Royal Academy described him in a moment that entity "to which I owe everything."
Although Turner first distinction achieved with precise architectural watercolors representing the picturesque ruins of melancholy and the great Gothic abbeys in all their variety, I knew I had to master the traditional art of oil painting if he was to be taken seriously. That means accepting the Academy hierarchy of genres in which history painting with his exciting stories derived from the Bible or the ancient writers like Homer and Virgil is considered the most demanding of art. It requires both technical skill and the ability to visually represent the morally uplifting lessons of these books.
As we can see in the halls of early exposure, Turner was surprisingly quick to assimilate the techniques of old masters such as Claude and the Dutch marine painters. He also learned from and was able to outshine his contemporaries as John Constable. However, bothered by the vilification of Academy of landscape as a "mere" reproduction of appearances. Their strategy was to infuse his canvases with heroic literary references and atmospheric effects created their own sense of drama. An early example, Dolbadern Castle, North Wales (1800), reveals a theatrical lighting castle atop a rocky terrain dark. In the foreground less than two soldiers on guard and a prisoner strapped to his knees which is a 13th century Welsh prince imprisoned in the castle by his brother. This bondage scene is dwarfed by the shadow of mountains and the scene of the castle looming in the background. In order to highlight its theme of freedom and servitude Turner adds several lines of verse (possibly written by him) in the original catalog description.
Turner was not only interested in bringing closer to his painting to poetry, was also decided to invest with the most fashionable ideas of contemporary philosophy. During the first decade of the nineteenth century, Turner earned his status as a core member of the British school of painting and even exciting terrifying scenes of overwhelming force of nature and greatness. Edmund Burke's Philosophical Research on the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1755) had popularized the idea that when viewed from a safe distance impressive and stimulating such scenes can lead to reflections on man's insignificance in the face of a vast and indifferent universe. The seas and skies of his watercolors thunderous agitation and oil was visually exciting to the sublime as interpreted by Burke.
The language of high rhetoric of the sublime, in turn became a key Turner's effort to increase the scope of his art, enabling it to approach the kind of universal themes that were crucial instructions for painting high status in history. In Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps (1812) at the end of the tail of the Carthaginian army in the first plane is intercepted by members local tribes, while far away a small figure (Hannibal?) on an elephant goes to the lowlands sunlit Italy. All the human figures in the painting are dwarfed by the stunning setting and the overwhelming power of the snow storm vortex of destructive energy. We note here for the first time the reason anticlassical composition of the maelstrom to which the artist would return throughout his career. By this time, Turner was writing his own poem: "Fallacies of Hope." Never complete this epic verses drew drew the roots of Hannibal's defeat in the decline in moral fiber of his military and martial virtue derived from their extended stay in the countryside of central Italy.
During the first two decades of adulthood Turner Britain was constantly at war with France revolutionary and Napoleonic. The painter was deeply patriotic concerned about this conflict that threatened the island nation. One of the decisive battles of the war Napoleon, was the naval victory of Trafalgar off the coast of Spain, where the British defeated the French and Spanish fleets. two paintings by Turner celebrates the victory dominate one of the largest exhibition halls. At the Battle of Trafalgar, as seen from the Mizen Starboard Shrouds of the Victory (1806) focuses on the moment when the victorious hero of the battle, Admiral Horatio Nelson is felled by a sniper's bullet. Nelson is located on the deck of the ship left of center. A composition is bold diagonally to the upper right of the canvas where the corpus delicti of the French marksman, located in the high gear of the French ship can be seen. The Battle of Trafalgar October 21, 1805 (1823-1824), Turner's only royal commission, is a big job like a scene from a Hollywood epic spectacular. Turner celebrates victory but also shows the confusion that attends the victory in a battle at sea. Move closer to the painting in the foreground is seen the devastating effects of war despair through the scores of men who are fighting for their lives in the troubled waters by the action fight. They seem to be coming from material in our direction as if he expected there was any chance that we can come to their aid in their plight.
In an October afternoon at its sixtieth anniversary, Turner witnessed the devastating fire that destroyed the Houses of Parliament – the symbol of the historical and political legacy of Britain in a representative government. In dozens of sketches and watercolors some of which were composed in the work safely, Turner represents the great power of the destructive forces of nature, a subject on which had not pondered all his life. At the same time, while the combination of elements involved in a great conflagration like this where fire, water and air are swirled in a whirlwind of heat and light reflected on the river called on Turner deeper aesthetic sensibility. The studies yielded two oil paintings of the same name the burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, October 16, 1834 (1835), which presented the scene from different points of view along the shores of Thames. This particular exhibition, the first time these amazing works in oils and watercolors have been exhibited together. For this reason alone is visited once an unforgettable experience.
Over the decades, as Turner's work became increasingly experimental, but left most of its viewers provoked, surprised and puzzled. There was much controversy continues in the press about the rough handling of his paintings, the high use of the body color and the darkness of their themes and style. Among his critics was the essayist William Hazlitt who noted that Turner's later work was "tinted steam" were and the end of the day "Paintings of nothing as much."
But Turner the fate of their champions. No less an expert judge of poetry by Alfred Lord Tennyson Turner calls "the Shakespeare of painting. "The artist encouraged such comparisons, reaching as to say he was born the same day as the bard of Avon. One of his most controversial works for is Juliet and her Nurse (1836), which instead of being set in Shakespeare's Verona is well established in Turner's Venice, with its panoramic view of San Marcos. Of course anyone, even a superficial knowledge of the work and its history will recall that the tragedy begins with the words: "In fair Verona, where we set our scene … "The geographical error was taken due note of the hostile critics, one of them suggested that this was a test of aging Turner senility. This in turn led to a young John Ruskin to write a letter in defense of Turner and his freedom to play with the locations of the works of Shakespeare in the service of his artistic vision final. The letter was never sent at the end, but its content in the direction of the first volume of Modern Painters Ruskin (1845). Here Ruskin provide brilliant defense of the truth within the landscapes of Turner that was built on defense when the other four volumes had the effect of transforming the way readers in Victorian England and America went to the appreciation of fine arts
About the Author
As early as the 1820′s, Turner began to look ahead to his posthumous reputation by making a will in which he deeded to the nation all his unsold works. He also left instructions that several of his works were to be hung next to those of the Old Masters by which his own pieces had been inspired.
Karen Kleinfelder: “On the Strange Place of the Human in Contemporary Art”