J.M.W. Turner: The Romantic Turns Reformist
Britain’s commander of the churning waves was also a painter of technology and industry. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston shows how he reshaped an art form.
BOSTON — Driving rain, salty air; the waves are so loud you can hardly hear the wailing. The weather is dreadful even by English standards, and the harbor-dwellers have rushed down to the beach, anxious to alert a ship in distress. Their clothes are soaked, their hair is bedraggled; they gaze out on the warning flares, bright flecks bursting in air against a small patch of blue.
The ship appears on fire, at least at first. But look closer: the ship is belching fire, from the depths of its engine room and out into the English air. It’s not a sailboat but a steamship, and that black fog out in the distance is an acrid tornado from the smokestack. Steam, and coal, have brought us to new shores; steam, and coal, have brought us to ruin.
J.M.W. Turner, prophet of climate change? That would be stretching it. But he was, at the very least, the 19th century’s great contriver of atmospheres and accidents, of human technologies and maritime affronts — and in churning compositions like “Rockets and Blue Lights (Close at Hand) to Warn Steam Boats of Shoal Water” (1840), he took the tradition of maritime painting and sailed it right into the storm clouds of the Industrial Revolution.
That’s the contention of “Turner’s Modern World,” an extensive and eruptive reassessment of the most celebrated painter of 19th-century Britain, now on view at the Museum of Fine Arts here. It’s not quite a revisionist approach. This exhibition still showcases his extraordinary atmospheric effects — a sunset in a wash of mauve oils, a squall rendered with a few strokes of a palette knife. It retains the full respiratory grandeur of his large seascapes, the nearly abstract polychromes of his late whaling pictures. Yet Turner (1775-1851) also appears here in the sharper light of contemporary history: a painter of war and independence, commerce and slavery, and the technological innovations that would split the sky in two.
“Turner’s Modern World” has been organized by Tate Britain in London, which owns the bulk of his paintings.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/07/arts/design/turner-painter-mfa-museum-boston.html
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