Keeper of the Light: JMW Turner at the National Gallery

Keeper of the Light
JMW Turner at the National Gallery
30 December 2007

James Wright's 1963 poem "A Blessing" ends with these lines:

If I stepped out of my body
I would break into blossom.

This image also describes the dynamics of JMW Turner's paintings and their effect on the viewer. His canvases contain so much emotion and complexity that their piercing light looks like a grand, majestic soul breaking into flower.

The Turner retrospective at the National Gallery achieves the impossible: it shows those of us who have always loved Turner that we hardly knew him. His large and small oils, watercolor and graphite sketches, and spontaneous oil studies, perfectly showcase a talent that, like the light in Turner's paintings, is unable to contain itself.

Like most visitors to this exhibition, I was prepared to be transfixed by his large-scale landscapes and seascapes, and I was. Having seen Turner largely through slides projected onto screens in art history lecture rooms, though, I was struck by the irony that projected light of a slide actually robs Turner's paintings of their light-dappled brilliance.

What I was not prepared for was the impact of his smaller works and works in other media. In this thoughtfully arranged, salon-style installation, small sketches sit alongside large works and allow us to see the full range of his genius. In his graphites and watercolors, many of them no larger than a sheet of notebook paper, we learn that in addition to being one of the greatest masters of the oil medium, Turner was also a peerless draftsman.

Coming as it did at the turn of the nineteenth century, his gestural, spontaneous use of oil paint was at least 65 years ahead of its time. But in the careful studies that preceeded the large works, we learn that precise structure and geometry buttress their endlessly seductive luminosity. This level of artistry is particularly notable in his watercolors, a largely disreputable medium in early 19th century Europe, considered by many to be less-than-serious, more the purview of well-bred young ladies than of England's greatest living artist.

The exhibition also features some of Turner's less familiar cathedral interiors. In these smaller works, church frescoes and mosaics impart a liquid energy that is similar to the famous skies in his landscapes. Like the searing rays that penetrate the clouds, the religious scenes in his church interiors are a jeweled, spiritual realm that elevates the worshipper and restores him to an ancient past.

What keeps Turner's paintings from becoming too beautiful? I think it is the edge of violence that lurks in most of them. His illustrations of disastrous contemporary events - the fire that destroyed Parliament, for example, or a doomed ship of female prisoners (and their young children) allowed to perish by a captain who feared being fined should any escape - are rendered in unbearably glorious colors and sensual brushstrokes. Even in his calmer subjects, Turner's roiling, black ocean waves; sharply jagged cliffs; and steep roads that fail to hold all anchor beauty in the dramatic wholeness of life. Ever-present reminders of blood, danger, and death sharpen our delight in beauty's pleasures. Turner's compatriate, Alfred Lord Tennyson termed nature, "red in tooth and claw," but we are shocked at how seductive that red can be. The inherent beauty found in pain and violence is examined in Nietzche's "The Birth of Tragedy". Turner's paintings approach the edge of pleasure/pain that Nietzche explored, but leave the viewer's imagination to cross it - alone and in its own way.

Turner's own position is articulated in a painting of a shipwreck that claimed the life of a close friend. Here, Turner places a solitary waterbird in the foreground. This black-silhouetted bird sadly skims the surface of now-peaceful waters that rest like a sleepy lion that has just consumed its prey and is ready for a long nap. The bird may be a pun on Turner's name; "M" = "Mallord," which alludes to "mallard". It is certainly an expression of Turner's place: the vigilant witness who, having just seen beauty and violence almost impossible to record, enters a realm between earth, sky, and water. Having someplace else to go, he moves quietly along. We watch until he disappears into the light.