After walking through the paintings and watercolors of J.M.W. Turner: painting set free, the word for Turner is “astonishing.” He was doing Rothkos 100 years before Rothko. But of course Turner was not doing abstract pictures at all. Even the preliminary works, never intended to be exhibited, like the exquisitely named “Sunrise with Sea Monsters” are observations of nature. On inspection the smudges resolve into cliffs and shore, and the vague washes above them delineate familiar daylight effects.
Moreover Turner’s sensibility was firmly fixed in the grand romantic tradition, illustrating scenes from Childe Harold and portraying Napoleon pondering a puddle with all the gusto of the trashiest Victorian illustrator. For all his seeming modernity, Turner was really contemporaries with Delacroix more than Monet. Or, rather, the contemporaries that are relevant to Turner are the extreme early Romantic originals: Blake, Hölderlin, Nerval, Gogol, and Büchner.
Too dense to grasp in a single visit …
[Image: Turner, Bedroom in the Palazzo Giustinian (the Hotel Europa), Venice, about 1840]
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