JMW Turner Retrospective Exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum in New York

First appeared in Border Crossings MagazineA poster of Salvador Dali’s 'Swans reflecting Elephants', a black and white photo of Marilyn Monroe leaning, like a feline, up against a door frame, and a swim-suited, cleavage-baring Farrah Fawcett all, among other delights, graced the walls of my bedroom when I was a teenager. So did J.M. W. Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire. And, though devoid of sexual content, this work’s passion and fire left an indelible mark on me.So it was with some disappointment that I failed to find this and another favourite, Rain, Steam and Speed with its famed rabbit in the foreground, among the paintings displayed in the recent J.W.M Turner retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum in New YorkThis said, there was no shortage of the sublime. Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus for example, contains a sky which critic and early Turner champion John Ruskin called “beyond comparison the finest which exists in Turner’s oil-paintings.” From seascapes and mountain tops to naval battles, historical Greek settings and wild imaginative abstractions this exhibition authoritatively traces the evolution of John Mallord William Turner’s varying style and choice of subject matter with representative sampling from a truly herculean output over a career that lasted more than sixty years. Much in this exhibit is literally brilliant. These paintings effortlessly captivate spectators, moth-like, within their orb.Born in London in 1775, Turner spent his early childhood in Covent Garden where his father had a barber shop. At an early age he showed talent for sketching, and worked for a time as an architect’s draftsman. At fourteen he enrolled in London’s Royal Academy of Arts Schools. In 1802 he became the youngest artist to be elected as a full Academician. Encouraged to study the techniques of the Old Masters Turner chose to emulate the idealized landscapes of Claude Lorrain (c.1604/5-82). These were to serve as a touchstone throughout his lifetime.In addition to dominating landscape art during the first half of the 19th century, Turner with his technical innovations in watercolor, had a profound impact on artistic development around the world, particularly in France, where painters such as Degas, Monet, Pissarro and Renoir pointedly credited him for influencing their work, notably with his depictions of the reality of form in movement and the fugitive phenomena of light.***Dazzled by a wall-filling image of Venice from the porch of Madonna della Salute, I was awed by this show before even stepping into its exhibition space. A clamour of eager, gate-crowding patrons milled around and filled, like Time Square, the entrance area, a testament to the excitement stirred by this impressive exhibit. Though the painting’s watery foreground was obscured by an ocean of people, Turner’s sky and buildings remained radiantly visible, proof that they easily match his much vaunted seas and waterscapes, of which Ruskin once said: "The surface of quiet water with other painters becomes fixed. With Turner it looks as if a fairy’s breath would stir it, but the fairy’s breath is not there."Many of the works Turner exhibited at the Royal Academy – those which established his reputation and ensured immortality - are on display here.  Fishermen at Sea (1796, Tate), for example, and the luminous Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16 October 1834 (1835, Philadelphia Museum of Art) and Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight (1835, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C).So are his “color beginnings” studies for subsequent paintings, and his finished watercolors.The exhibition is organized both thematically and chronologically, beginning with early Sublime and historical landscapes and ending with late seascapes and blinding, abstract and very modern unfinished works. Early on you can see his skilled draftsmanship at work in an exquisite watercolour depiction of Tintern Abbey in South Wales. His penchant for clouds and majestic settings are also displayed in, for example, The Devil’s Bridge, Saint Gotthard (painted in the Swiss Alps and owned I might add, by a private collector in Canada). These have an almost Blakean feel to them, evidencing an attempt at what Burke called ‘the sublime’: the conveying of ‘astonishment and terror, or the strongest emotion of which the mind is capable of feeling.’Perhaps because of its greater capacity to convey drama and depth, and its higher prestige, Turner moved to painting in oil. The first of these to be exhibited was Fisherman at Sea, at the Royal Academy. It contained elements which would fill his canvases for the next half century. The way his moonlight hits the ocean is truly wondrous. His waves in this and other seascapes are reminiscent of Gustave Courbet’s paintings of the same, just miles away across the Channel: muscular and alive.Also in the exhibit were depictions of historical landscapes and important contemporary events, such as the Battle of Waterloo and the Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, a blazing painting worth sitting in front of for hours.With Turner’s visit to Italy there is a marked shift in palette. We see warmer colours and softer brush strokes. There are fewer clouds too. His strengths however remain: breathtaking skies, sunsets and light in weather fair and foul, reflected in water. These fill the senses to a point where the odd sail out of sync, or disproportionately small boat, just don’t matter. Nor does the fact that people, though inconsequential in most paintings, at times appear sketchy, under drawn, grotesque - in the way Pieter Bruegel painted them. Given Turner’s prodigious output it's easy to see why some critics accused his work of being unfinished, coarse even. The pleasant irony here is that, as we get to the end of the exhibit and his so-called ‘unfinished’ work, we are treated to what is possibly the most completely sublime experience of the afternoon.