The Modernity of Cousin Turner

...In Burial at Sea, the black ship, its sails etched against the sky, dissolves into a cloud of smoke, creating a form that is at once powerfully real and functionally abstract...

...I am of two minds about his last works, those fiery abstractions currently installed in a tendentious exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art...

...they are too scant in pictorial incident to serve as epics in the representational manner...

...It is this radical aspect of Turner's work which the Museum has kept well in the foreground of its present exhibition...

...There is, however, a taint of selfcongratulation in our taking up an artist from the past...

...They gave scope to the grandeur of his theme-the destructive and refining powers of the elements-while providing an irreducible bit of reality to stand at the center of a drama in which the forces of nature were transformed into the urgencies of style...

...Even in two of his earlier works, Battermele Lake and The Fifth Plague of Egypt, representative of his academic style, if we disregard the teeming detail, we can still recognize the compositional armature that structures a painting like Festive Lagoon Scene, Venice, done 40 years later...

...There is the inevitable horizontal division, the same focal point of light radiating outward from near dead center...

...Turner's record of the fire forms a splendid auto-dafe of sorts...

...But there is an opposite view...

...The 19th century, it seems, was more complex than we had supposed...

...Turner, in his beaver hat and dark coat, was caricatured as dipping a mop in a bucket of yellow paint in order to achieve some of his extraordinary effects...

...In general, the more abstract Turner's later paintings become, the duller they seem-vaporous, muddy in color, unresolved...

...the smoke and pretty flames' flare up into the air, are carried downward as reflections in the Thames...

...Constable, in irritation, spoke of the finishing process as giving the public so much "eye salve...

...they represented the triumph of the artist over the "barrenness of the subject...

...These presentiments are hardly alien to a society living under the threat of a mushroom cloud...

...The real masterpieces of the exhibition, and they are as vital as anything accomplished in English painting, are The Burning of the Houses of Parliament, Peace: Burial at Sea, Snow Storm: Steamboat off a Harbour's Mouth, paintings exhibited during Turner's lifetime...

...In October 1834, London was the scene of a spectacular fire in which the Houses of Parliament were burned to the ground...

...It was even promoted by Sir Joshua Reynolds in his discourse on architecture...

...Yet Turner's later paintings, with some paradoxical exceptions, leave me cold...

...There is some justice in viewing Turner in this light...

...In the later versions in oil (of which he made several), Turner bridges the contending elements...

...It was an historic event, not on the order of an atomic explosion, but powerful nonetheless, which brought together the disparate claims of imagination and reality one senses even in the earliest of Turner's works...

...The critics of Turner's day were, in fact, prescient...

...Many of them were knowledgeable painters, but they were put off by the aggressiveness of Turner's style...

...one can sense his awe and fascination as the solid structure of reality is transformed, consumed, carried upward in a glorious burst of incandescence...

...Turner's apocalyptic vision is as relevant as his technique...

...Harsher critics claimed that Turner's landscapes were "pictures of nothing and very like...

...Working hurriedly and from different vantage points, he roughed in the pink and yellow flames billowing up into the darkened sky...

...Where Turner tries to fit these paintings out with unobtrusive detail, the results are sometimes ludicrous, as with the unconvincing monster in Sunrise with Sea Monster, or the leg of the jettisoned slave flopping amid a school of unlikely fish in a corner of The Slave Ship...

...The cultivation of the accidental was also considered a virtue in another English art-landscape gardening...

...One feels that he tried to recapture the force of the experience in many of his later works...

...In the exhibition, these notebook sketches are shown in a projection room adjacent to the picture galleries...

...The catalogue text, ably written by Lawrence Gowing, Keeper of British Paintings at the Tate Gallery, secures Turner's contemporary reputation at every feasible point...

...inevitably, we seem so much wiser than his critics...

...We have a new Turner, our contemporary, our cousin, whose late works, many of which were never exhibited during his lifetime, have established him as a precursor of abstract painting...

...Even in his earlier work, they recognized the implications of his style and arrayed themselves against it...

...There is a monotonous sameness to his compositions...

...So far as the use of the accidental was concerned, it had a precedent in the blot paintings of Alexander Cozens...

...Moreover, it is as a prototype of the Abstract Expressionist painter that Gowing presents the strange figure of this English landscapist dead for more than a century...

...Turner, who did not ordinarily paint directly from the scene, made a series of watercolor sketches of the event...

...It is difficult to see where, in these paintings at least, Turner has made concessions to public taste...

...That, no doubt, is the meaning of his late painting, The Angel Standing in the Sun-a flaming judgment in which reality is purified...

...They saw Turner's influence as damaging to academic values-and they were right...

...A signal event had provided Turner with an elemental drama...

...In these paintings, he found subjects whose force and gravity freed his vision from hampering detail...

...One thinks of the morbid temper of his themes...

...Yet, even on the basis of their exhibited work, both men were criticized for taking liberties with traditional practices...

...They lack the formal decisiveness to succeed as pure abstractions...

...His influence, coursing through the French Impressionists down to our own day, is undeniable...

...Constable, whose cloudscapes were once described as "white sky mud" referred to Turner as "stark mad...

...These contemporary accounts, included in the catalogue text, lend a certain credibility to Gowing's version of Turner as an action painter well before his time...

...Had Turner's critics understood his real importance, we feel, they might have accepted his radical departures with better grace...

...They are the work of a painter in command of a radical technique...

...With works like these, there is no need to call upon the support of prophetic abstractions...

...Yet, despite the criticism, Turner was a successful painter and a member of the Royal Academy...

...it has taken a full century to grasp Turner's significance...

...The emphasis on technique and matiere was as much a feature of Constable's painting as it was of Turner's...

...In Snow Storm, the steamboat, canted on a tumultuous sea, becomes the focal point of a composition that radiates outward with superb authority...

...When younger painters took up Turner's direct manner, applying color with the palette knife, disturbed critics wrote sarcastically of trowels and mortar...

...Accidental effects, the dominance of technique over subject matter, the emphasis on insubstantial light and color, the artist as a combatant: These are persuasive arguments in favor of relating Turner to the Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s and even, perhaps, to the younger painters of today for whom color is the operative consideration...

...Like Constable, Turner withheld certain of his paintings from public view...

...Even Turner's performances on Varnishing Days at the Royal Academy, when exhibiting artists were allowed to touch up their works, were the subject of criticism...

...Hopper, the English portraitist, found Turner's painterly method "presumptive.' Fuseli, whose theories on art Turner respected, thought the latter's Holy Family "like the embryo or blot of a great master of colouring...

...First of all, there is his present reputation to contend with, for Turner is no longer the familiar 19th-century landscapist whose Venetian scenes-resplendent boats, sparkling blue waters (even more resplendent and sparkling in colored reproductions)-supplied a dazzling vista against the oatmeal colored wallpaper of our grandparents' parlors 30 years ago...

...raging storms, holocausts, wrecks, burials at sea-symbols of dissolution and death...

...These should constitute an irresistible bribe for the critic...

...We have been tardily educated...

...Turner's reputation is secure...

...So intolerant was the demand for academic finish that both men exhibited only those paintings which might meet with public acceptance...

...Where, then, is the problem...

...However relevant to our own day, Turner's values were securely based in his own...

...Cousin Turner was a man of his times, admiring Claude and trying to learn a little Greek...

...If this were not enough, there are literary and non-formal aspects of Turner's art which make him pertinent today...

...Hazlitt complained that Turner's canvases were "too much abstractions of aerial perspective, and representations not properly of the objects of nature as of the medium through which they were seen...

...Turner stands clearly as one of the great painters in the Western tradition...

...Surprisingly, the critics of Turner's time are among the most convincing witnesses of his modernity, if not of his Abstract Expressionism...