How Turner became a master
LONDON, U.K. — Who are the most competitive people in the world? Olympic sprinters, with their years of training for 10 or 20 seconds of glory? Boxers like Ali? Golfers like Tiger?
Nope. The most competitive people in the world are visual artists. People who paint or sculpt know they have signed on for a life that is likely to see them die before their time in obscurity and poverty. Being the best is about all they have to console themselves with.
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"Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery," by Rembrandt van Rijn in 1644 |
Very few artists are as nakedly competitive as England’s greatest painter of all time, Joseph Mallord William Turner, as an extraordinary exhibition at London’s Tate Gallery demonstrates. Called "Turner and the Masters" it simply hangs Turner paintings next to works of the Old Masters against whom he felt the need to measure himself. They are not small names: Titian, Rembrandt and Poussin, among others, are all on display. Needless to say, the crowds are massive.
From the very first room with its early paintings of ships in storms in the style of the great Dutch painters of the Golden Age, a visitor is taken inside Turner’s head. You can see what he borrowed and you can see the little touches where he tried to improve on the painter of the past. It doesn’t always work.
One Rembrandt on display at the Tate is the New Testament story of "The Woman Taken in Adultery" and it is one of his greatest paintings. You can practically hear a heavenly chord thrumming in your head when looking at the divine light that bathes Christ and the woman. Hanging Turner’s version of the scene next to it does the artist no favors. Turner’s color is garish, the figures cartoonish, there is absolutely no religious feeling to the picture at all. Now, the visitor asks, did Turner realize Rembrandt was the winner? Did he acknowledge to himself that the Dutch artist was so much better than he was at this kind of painting?
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| "Pilate Washing his Hands," by JMW Turner, exh. RA 1830 (Tate) |
David Solkin, dean of the prestigious Courtauld Institute of Art, isn’t sure that is the right question to ask. Solkin devised the exhibition and he confesses to second thoughts about emphasizing the competitive aspect of "Turner and the Masters." "Every journalist thinks of it as literally a competition and wants to know the scorecard. Did Turner win? Is he in the top four of the Premier League?" Solkin offers no judgment.
A better word than competition, according to the art historian is "emulation." Turner possessed a desire for greatness and understood a basic rule, according to Solkin: "If you are going to be the best, you have to be able to paint like the very best."
The desire to be the best can be traced back to Turner’s extremely humble beginnings. He was born in 1775 over his father’s barber shop in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden. Today the neighborhood is the epicenter of tourist London with expensive shops and restaurants, but back then it was a high crime area, home to theaters (very disreputable), brothels and the city’s main wholesale vegetable market. The smell of booze, cheap perfume and rotting food was its essential characteristic. Turner aspired to membership of the Royal Academy of Arts. Its members came from the upper reaches of society. The only way he could gain entry was to be better than his social superiors in technique and conception.
"He was a first-class student," said Solkin. The exhibition backs him up. The beginning of Turner’s career coincided with London’s emergence as the center of the art world. Following the French Revolution the old masters that hung in the homes of the French nobility started turning up in London. They were brought by refugees from the Reign of Terror or smuggled out and sold. Early Turner commissions called on the artist to provide paintings in the style of French masters like Nicolas Poussin and Claud Lorrain. He did this with considerable ability.
Wandering through the exhibition can be a little disorienting for modern Turner fans who swoon at his astonishing seascapes that anticipate the impressionism of Monet by a good 75 years. In the first rooms there are interesting but not spectacular paintings that almost precisely "emulate" the composition and color and draftsmanship of the masters. Only occasionally do they show flashes of what is to come: The sunlight is diffuse, misted over, as the sunlight frequently is in Britain. The story in the picture breaks apart into abstraction — pure emotion is palpable in paintings of biblical scenes.
While Rembrandt wins the "Woman Taken in Adultery" round, in the next room are a couple of paintings of angels where the real Turner bursts forth. The Briton is done emulating Rembrandt, the greatest pound for pound painter of all time. Now he paints as himself and the idea of competition loses any real meaning. He is the best Turner of all time, not the third best Rembrandt.
That is what a visitor takes away from this exhibition: The real competition Turner was involved in was a competition with himself. The truer he was to his own vision the more breathtaking his work became.
Solkin acknowledges this is only part of how to understand what JMW Turner was doing. "He never lost touch with the art of the past. That’s what made it possible for him to push forward."
"Turner and the Masters" shows at London’s Tate Britain through Jan. 31, 2010.