Burial at SeaTurner exhibitions are major crowd pullers and art lovers all over the world, particularly in the UK, flock to the exhibitions of the British artist widely recognised to have anticipated 20th-century modernism.
The exhibition currently on at Tate Britain is the third in the span of four years to prevalently focus on Turner; the others were presented by Tate Britain (2010) and the London National Gallery (2012).
It also coincides with two other major Turner exhibitions in the UK. Earlier this year, The Lady Lever Art Gallery in Liverpool presented Turner: Travels, Light and Landscape, which featured works from the Turner collections at the national museums of Liverpool, including paintings, prints and watercolours.
Turner and the Sea, presenting maritime paintings as one of Turner’s strengths in a complementary museum venue, was presented by the Maritime Museum in Greenwich earlier this year too. In contrast, Late Turner – Painting Set Free stands as an excellent example of the potential which the Tate Britain Turner Bequest holds, including 300 oil paintings and over 30,000 sketches and watercolours donated by the artist.
Indeed, the bequest stands as a museum collection proper. Last year, the National Gallery of Australia hosted Turner from the Tate: The making of a master, which exclusively presented works by Turner held by the Tate, as the exhibition title clearly implies.
The Tate Britain exhibition draws primarily from the Turner Bequest which the institution holds and the few loans included provide the missing depth of narrative which the Turner Bequest cannot provide single-handedly.
I suspect this was made necessary in part by Tate Britain’s deliberate choice of focus on Turner’s late years, but this cannot be understood in any way to imply that research on the Turner Bequest is a closed chapter.
This exhibition presents three recently-discovered watercolours which depict a raging fire at the Tower of London as proof of this.
Loans from peer institutions in the UK, such as the British Museum, The Ashmolean Museum, the Courtauld Institute and the London National Gallery, feature prominently. Loans from foreign institutions are but a small fraction and include paintings from American museums such as the Kimbell Art Museum and the J. Paul Getty. European museums are the exception; the only loan is from the Neue Pinakotek in Munich.
The chosen focus of the exhibition is Turner’s last 15 years of his career, between 1835 and 1851, when people of his age were then acknowledged to be senile old men.
We do know that Turner became more eccentric as he grew old and that he suffered from bouts of depression.
The Tate Britain exhibition also suggests that his style may have been partly influenced by his health.
Turner’s spectacles on display, enclosed in a box together with one of his palettes, suggest that he may have suffered from the progressive degeneration of his eyesight.
The display is well thought out and the contrasting backdrop colours complement the artist’s very own colour palette
The debate concerning Turner’s health has also referred to cataracts but what this exhibition presents, as produced by Turner at such a ripe age, is a bold and surprisingly innovative repertoire of works by the standards of his times. Sir David Piper, the renowned British art historian and museum director, aptly defines Turner’s late works as “fantastic puzzles”. This is, indeed, what this exhibition seeks to show.
The six themes which this exhibition presents flow very well. The first section serves the purpose of a general introduction connecting the following five sections, each focused on a particular theme. Turner’s travels during the decade 1835 to 1845 feature a series of sketchbooks filled with studies done by the artist during his travels.
The dialectic between a historic past and Turner’s is showcased by juxtaposing the artist’s history paintings set in hist-oric landscapes with paintings showing the remnants of the past in his present.
As expected, Turner’s seascapes are given pride of place in a dedicated section and the exhibition concludes with the artist’s late works: abstract meditations, possibly unfinished, which the artist probably never intended for display.
The exhibition curators have also included biographical connections which serve the purpose of a subplot which links together the exhibition themes. Turner’s ambitions are clearly perceived in his choice of title for particular works.
A View of Port Ruysdael may, at first, be understood as a reference to a fictitious port. It refers, instead, to one of the artist’s chosen mentors, the Dutch artist Salomon van Ruysdael (1602-1670) and Turner’s fictitious harbour becomes the evidence of a tangible artistic influence in his career.
Other references are less difficult to decipher. The first section narrates Turner’s role as a recognised mentor to a younger and up-and-coming generation of artists at the academy. Other sections describe Turner’s particular method to lure potential patrons by presenting samples in watercolour providing a glimpse of the proposed painting.
The display is well thought out and the contrasting backdrop colours complement the artist’s very own colour palette.
Watercolours are shown together to carefully balance the master’s larger oil paintings. Combinations are carefully thought out and some areas of the hang, particularly those showing same-size landscapes, suggest an itinerary which the audience is inspired to imagine when moving from one painting to the next.
There is one last comment which the exhibition artfully suggests. Turner’s three episodes from the classical story of Dido and Aeneas are hung next to each other at the end.
What comes across most clearly, even more than the high calibre of Turner’s works, is the curator’s effort at recreating the original frame for two of these, based on the original surviving frame belonging to the third.
Indeed, replica frames are put to good use by recreating the original feel of a Turner painting suggesting that frames are to be rightly considered as part and parcel of the work of art rather than a necessity of sorts.
Late Turner – Painting Set Free is open at Tate Britain, London, until January 25. It will then travel to the de Yong Museum in San Francisco and the J.P. Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
www.tate.org.uk
Sandro Debono is Senior Curator at Muża.