Page 54 - Studio International - June 1966

single gallery. He sought to absorb all contemporary
trends and to master all the Old Masters who seemed at
the time significant; yet he was in the last resort concerned
only with his personal vision.
In the process he burst through all existing stereotypes
and in effect created modern art. He was so far ahead of
his time that only in the last few years have critics
realized that almost all the advanced tendencies of
twentieth-century art can be found somewhere in his
work. Recently Adrian Stokes has noted anticipations of
Cezanne and Klee; Bryan Robertson, of Redon, Rouault,
Bacon, Kokoschka.
He had been showing works only a few years when
connoisseurs and critics saw him an enemy, a White
Painter and an Overturner ; Hazlitt saw him as a painter
of Nothing. Such opponents already felt the implications
of his work. By driving up the colour-key and seeking to
achieve the brightness of actual sunlight, he was the first
of all artists to realize and express the unity of colour and
light. Thus he decisively discarded all intellectualized
concepts of colour, or the naturalistic use of local colours,
which had ruled till then. And by breaking through the
old notions of light and colour, he also broke through all
the methods used for organizing form in art. More and
more he jettisoned the systems of pyramids and diagonals.
In a limited way the serpentine recessions of Mannerism
and the kinetic patterns of Rococo had prepared the
path; but in him alone appeared the decisive point of
break. The vortex became his typical form of composi-
John Ruskin tion, and what now rules is a field of force, superseding
J. M. W. Turner as he was
dressed for his visit to the the old geometries of line or curve, and revealing an
opening of the Royal Academy infinitely complex system of inner tensions, with its own
Collection: Richard Eurich
subtle point of dynamic centralization.
turous quest we cannot overstress the part played by his A crucial event was his visit to Italy in 1819. Instead of
response to poetry. rediscovering Claude, he reacted to the flooding sun-
The climax of his first stage came with Hannibal Crossing light, and began powerfully his progress to an art in
the Alps. Here he expressed his matured world-view and which nature in movement became one with the light-
released fully his new dynamic sense by using the vortex colour storms, even chiaroscuro giving way to pure
to organize his material. The theme brings to a head the definition by colour. He first broke through in a series of
various revolts and searchings mentioned above; the remarkable experiments in watercolour, and gradually
verses state clearly the concept of what he called the carried the same vision over into his oils.
Fallacies of Hope—the way in which men betray their Further, as the artist of process, of symmetry toppling
heroic achievements and break down into corruption by into asymmetry and of asymmetry trembling on the
the failure to confront fully their own nature. verge of symmetry, he defined nature in time as well as
We can thus estimate the importance of getting inside in space. In his own way he thus anticipated what has
Turner's personal life, his aims and anxieties. No other been a crux of modern art since Futurism and Cubism.
way can we reach sure ground for grasping the way in We can isolate some of his devices here, e.g. a superim-
which he drove right through all existing stereotypes, position of two kinds of perspective, but essentially he
and, while keeping true to his vision of natural process, achieved his effect by the dynamic handling of paint.
developed his own form of emotional symbolism, with Other painters, such as Rubens and Hals, had helped to
complex social implications. With all the differences in define rhythm, pattern, texture, by the way they laid
technique, he appears as the brother of Blake, defining on paint; but only with Turner do we meet a demonic
the earthly paradise of human potentiality and setting way of painting which embodies and expresses the dyna-
against it his bitter vision of doom, his judgement of a mic tensions of the fields of force that compose nature.
corrupted society going blindly on its way to shipwreck. Accounts of his way of working show that he did not
His forward drive, as I have said, was at the cost of a stand back to check tonal values, etc. ; even when a work
ceaseless anxiety. On one side, he longed above all for was finished, he did not need to look at it. Everything
security; on the other, he kept on discarding all easy ways had gone into it through his hand in its skilled and
towards it. He clung to money, but was as generous as spontaneous play, the complex depths of colour and the
he was stingy. He called his paintings his 'children' and inner tensions, expressive of the moment of change or
mourned when he sold one; he put his thwarted family- development, which built up form within a time-space of
emotions into plans for keeping them all together in a unitary light. q