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Turner:
Painting as an
Organism of Light
Until recently, when a
wholesale revision of reputations and change of taste set in in the arts, people
who prided themselves on being up-to-date looked patronizingly back on Turner as
an artist for adolescents. Today, when it has become fashionable for a painter
to speak of himself as a romantic abstract-expressionist, Turner is coming back
into favor.
I think these attitudes
point up certain more obvious qualities of his work — probably faults rather
than virtues. They may both be summed up in one generalization: Turner was a
plebeian artist with thoroughly plebeian tastes.
Taste can be a great
obstacle to the appreciation of painting, as is obvious again in Turner’s polar
opposite, William Blake. It makes or breaks second-rate work, but it has little
to do with the very greatest paintings, or at least painters. Cezanne, for
instance, had no taste whatever. Turner’s positive passion for trees with silky
silhouettes, sunsets no artist could paint, snowstorms in the Alps that beat
about the head of Livy’s Hannibal, storms at sea that beset Captain Kidd, seems
a little ingenuous and boyish to sensibilities corrupted by a century of black
bile, alienation, and world ill.
Many people still think
of Turner in terms of the reproduction which hung on the wall in high school.
Before approaching him as a serious artist it is necessary to overcome a natural
modern distaste for his taste. It would be easier for most people if he had
painted ugly pictures. We have been taught to look through and past the ugly.
Unfortunately he painted very pretty pictures indeed, prettier than Russell
Flint or Leon Kroll.
Once the initial shudder
of repugnance is past, it becomes apparent that Turner was not only one of the
climacteric painters, a genuine original and an undying influence, but that his
plastic notions, his idea of space, and the ends which he envisaged as possible
in painting are peculiarly modern — modern in this case meaning something very
different from the Cubist-Classicism of the first quarter of the century or the
psychologism of the second.
I am not going to talk
about Turner’s more famous paintings — the illustrative and picturesque
landscapes, the heroic compositions, the battle pieces, and the sentimental
anecdotes, like the Téméraire or Sea Burial of Wilkie. I think
most of these are very great paintings. The last is a spectacular abstract
composition in red, grey, and black. But they are endangered by their obvious
appeal. Instead I shall try to trace, in terms of pictures most of which can be
found in collections of reproductions, the evolution of Turner not only as an
abstract artist but as a painter who was working towards a vision of a kind of
space unknown in the Occident. Tintoretto and Tiepolo had preceded him, but
their achievements were not understood. Turner’s were not to be understood
either. The nineteenth century appreciated him for his romantic, picturesque
landscapes, the Impressionists for his divided and brilliant color, the early
twentieth century smiled patronizingly.
Speaking of his color and
of the necessity of discussing him as a painter in books, it happens that Turner
had very little respect for his métier, or at least no knowledge of color
chemistry. Practically all of the few paintings in American collections bear
little resemblance to their original state. In mid life he began to take more
care. Even so, hundreds of his paintings had disintegrated or faded hopelessly
by the time of his death. The best are in the great Turner galleries in the
Tate, in the National Gallery, and in a few English private collections. There
are, though, many volumes of excellent color reproductions in any well-stocked
public library.
I don’t want to talk
about Turner’s technical means and his mastery of them. He was one of the first
artists to use divided color consistently. He was one of the first artists to
use pure spectrum color. He was one of the first artists to think of a painting
as what has come to be called an abstraction. But these items in the history of
art we have all learned in high school. Any revolutionary decorator could have
accomplished as much. He is more important than this.
Leaving aside for a
moment the main development of Turner’s art, I would like to say something about
an aspect of his life which has always embarrassed his British biographers and
critics — his attitude toward people and toward sex. His human figures have a
strange inhumanity. This is something that seems to have been a
late-eighteenth-century convention. They are like Longhi but less doll-like,
more perhaps like Goya than anyone else, whose Spain, Time, and History
(1799) might have been painted by Turner. This is an attitude towards people
which will lead eventually to Giacometti or Tanguy, or, for that matter,
Nadelman. These figures are the androids of science fiction — Between Decks
(1827, Tate); Jessica (around 1830, Collection of Lord Leconfield,
Petworth) — one of the most startlingly human figures in the world’s art, she
looks for all the world like a visitor popping her head out of a flying saucer;
and the large, red, unfinished nude in the Tate, which certainly has none of the
appearance of a calendar girl but is one of the hottest pictures ever painted —
so much so that it is positively difficult to look at. I happen to have seen it
the same day I saw Boucher’s La Petite Morphi, which was in London on
loan at the time and which is a very great painting in its own right. No chasm
separates these two women, but a whole universe. I don’t wonder that Turner
couldn’t finish it. But as far as he went he painted one of the world’s most
unforgettable thoughts.
With these pictures,
which all seem to have been painted at Petworth around 1830, it is convenient to
place The Room at Petworth (1830, British Museum), because of its color
— red — and its treatment of interior light — shafts and whorls of sun motes.
It is the most fashionable of Turner’s paintings nowadays, one of his greatest,
and the first intimation of the purely visionary style of his last years.
Looking into a book of
Turner will impart something of the same sensation, but nothing can compare with
walking into the great Turner galleries of the Tate. The sensation is not an
aesthetic one but a human one. You feel immersed in the very being of a
personality. It is like acquiring all at once a lifetime of a close family
relationship. The ideal classical painting is as impersonal as Poussin — the
person simply does not exist behind the canvas. A gallery full of Poussins would
be a gallery full of independent objects of art which might just as well have
grown naturally like crystals. Only the full impact of room after room of
intensely personal and expressionistic paintings like Turner’s can bring home
the full meaning of expressionism, personalism.
It is this personal power
and personal integrity, fully as much as the plastic originality, which almost
immediately override Turner’s taste.
It is interesting to
compare Blake and Turner. Once again, like Poe and Whitman, the culture reveals
its polarity. Both of them were tasteless artists, yet with Palmer and Calvert
they are the leading painters of Great Britain. They were tasteless artists
because good taste was not so much bad as trivial. They were plebeian artists
and upstarts because official society was not so much vicious or dishonest as
stereotyped. This is not always necessarily true, but looking back on the
nineteenth and late eighteenth centuries, it is easy to believe that it has
been.
Blake drew, rather than
painted, objects in empty space. His work was a sort of small hypertrophy of the
principles of Renaissance art. He was to Marcantonio as Marcantonio was to
Raphael or Michelangelo — a reduction in scale, an increase in specialization.
With all his hatred of Newton, he was an eminently Newtonian painter. Doubtless
he would have hated Machiavelli too, but the figures of his mythology, whether
plastic or literary, were isolated Renaissance men struggling with each other
for mastery — Job, Los, Enitharmon, Satan are figures like the Borgias and the
Medicis.
Turner painted, at least
in his maturity, dynamic saturated space, all the forces of which were
organically related like the strains and stresses, the vacuoles, vortices, and
pseudopods which make up the living processes of an amoeba. Even in the heroic
paintings, Ulysses is a scrawl of color, Polyphemus a cloud.
Both Turner and Blake
started out as artists for the engraver and continued such work all their lives.
Blake’s excited polemic for outline, silhouette, sharp planes of black and
white, is known to everyone. As for Turner, Pye, his best engraver, said, “The
one great aim of landscape art is to enable the spectator to see, as it were,
into space; and this can be done only by a perfect knowledge of light.”
This is a description of
emotional or even spiritual phenomena, rather than a statement of fact. If one
compares Turner and his engravers with the work of Stothard and Blake, or even
better with the contemporary French and Italian mezzotint and steel engravers,
it is apparent that he was practically the inventor of the romantic vista which
was to ornament the fine books of a century — the long receding stage sets of
tonalities, late afternoon light shining through the whole meteorological
collection of cloud forms — so different from the building-block landscapes,
the cones, cylinders, and cubes, the representation of great mass, typical of
the classical tradition as seen in Poussin. And, of course, different from the
linear art of the best French engravers.
It is very seldom that an
artist realizes immediately upon its invention the possibilities of a medium as
Turner did those of steel engraving. The mezzotint technique of the Liber
Studiorum approaches the later attitude toward light, but the medium sets
definite limits — the limits, say, of the landscapes of Claude Lorrain or
Rubens. The contrast of dark and light still looks suspiciously technical —
sfumato.
All his life Turner
painted Norham Castle. Compare the early paintings with the famous watercolor of
1835, the mezzotint of the Liber Studiorum with the engraving. This
attitude toward reality as a complex of vortices of pure light reaches its
height in the engravings in pictures like Llanthony Abbey (1835) in the
England and Wales series.
The next step plastically
is A Storm in the Mountains, once in the Darrell Brown collection but
painted before 1810. Only the lower-right sixth of the painting contains some
trees and cows. The rest is a turbulence of mingled rock, cloud, and light.
By 1835, one of Turner’s
great years, many of the paintings and most of the watercolors have moved close
to abstraction. This is the year of Sunrise, A Boat Between Headlands,
Hastings, and the most abstract Norham Castle. From this point on,
Turner moved steadily toward perfect mastery of a new vision.
It is exciting to take
another subject like Norham Castle and trace it down the years: St. Gothard
Pass in the Liber Studiorum. The sketches and watercolors of 1802,
1803, culminating in the Pass of St. Gothard Near Faido (1843), once in
Ruskin’s collection and now, as I remember, in the Tate. The last is like
nothing else in the world of art except Turner. This is the light metaphysics of
the neo-Platonists and the medieval mystics. In paintings like this, Turner may
not be a greater painter than Sesshu, Ying Yu-Chien, Hsia Kuei, the dragon
painters, Tintoretto, or Tiepolo. But he has fully understood the nature of his
vision — certainly more fully than any Western European artist except
Tintoretto or Tiepolo. The principal difference with Turner is, again, this time
on a very high level, his plebeian taste. His concept of space is the same as
Sesshu’s. It is simply more simple-minded, less refined and less complex. In
other words, less goes on in it and what does is more obvious.
I should say that the
great paintings always to be found on exhibit in the Turner galleries of the
Tate or the National Gallery and all reproduced somewhere in color are The
Burning of the Ships (after 1840, Tate), Snow Storm at Sea (1842,
National Gallery), Rain, Steam, and Speed (1844, National Gallery),
Sunrise with Sea Monster (1845, Tate), Mercury and Argus (1836,
Tate), Juliet and Her Nurse (1836, Tate), Sea Piece (1842, once in
the Orrock Collection), and finally the great visionary paintings of his last
years, his seventies, culminating in An Angel in the Sun (1846, Tate),
Queen Mab’s Cave (1846, National Gallery), Mercury Sent to Admonish
Aeneas (1850, Tate), Aeneas and Dido (1850, Tate), Departure of
the Trojan Fleet (1850, Tate), and The Visit to the Tomb (1850,
Tate).
These are not just
paintings of a special vision. They are visionary paintings of a transcendence
curiously like Blake at his best, but the work of an incomparably more
knowledgeable painter.
It is remarkable how
un-Western-European Turner was. He lived all his life in great simplicity, with
his workingman father, and two successive mistresses who were both illiterate.
He amassed an immense fortune and left it, with all his paintings, the best of
which he had refused to sell, to his native country and to charity. (His will
was broken by remote and greedy heirs.)
His life was an
imperturbable march toward an always growing light — that reality peculiarly
Turner’s — and an ever increasing mastery of the means of expressing that
vision.
There is not the
slightest trace in his life of artistic vanity or worldly ambition. In the sense
in which the Greek philosophers meant it, in the sense of Lao-tze, he lived
unknown.
KENNETH REXROTH
1955
This essay originally
appeared in The Art Digest (February 1955) and was reprinted in Bird
in the Bush (New Directions, 1959). Copyright 1959. Reproduced here by
permission of the Kenneth Rexroth Trust.
[Other Rexroth Essays]
[REXROTH ARCHIVE]
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