J.M.W. Turner

On a busy Saturday that included Woody Allen's latest film and a production of Hair in Central Park, I also stopped by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to catch a large exhibit of the work of J.M.W. Turner, a British painter from the first half of the nineteenth century. Many of his paintings are quite beautiful to behold, and suggest that he was ahead of his time.

Turner's early career consisted of landscapes and historical paintings, such as two of the Battle of Trafalgar. As was the style, he tended to place the humans, if he included any at all, in the foreground, and make them quite small. This was done, probably, to suggest how insignificant people are when compared with nature. However, when you look at the paintings up close it's clear that people were not Turner's strong point, as they seem cartoonish and unfinished. He might as well have left them out.

As his career went on, Turner's eye for light became increasingly strong. Often he would paint scenes, such as several of the Grand Canal in Venice, with the sun directly in the viewer's eyes, and thus the sunlight bleeds into the work, creating magnificent effects. Later, he would become obsessed by a fire that consumes the Houses of Parliament. An entire room of the museum consisted of the many studies he made of that fire, and how the blaze wrapped itself around the buildings.

The notecards by the paintings make it clear that Turner was hammered by critics during his lifetime. It's not hard to see why--he was turning away from the style of the time and prefiguring the impressionist movement. It isn't a big leap to look at his paintings and then wander over a few feet to the nineteenth-century European paintings wing to see how Monet, Degas, and others were influenced by him.

I liked his late paintings best, when they become almost abstract. Consider the one pictured here, titled Snowstorm: Steamboat Off a Harbour's Mouth. There's nothing terribly realistic about this picture--I suppose you can identify the central image as a watercraft of some kind, but would one be so quick to do so if the title weren't readily available? The swirls of color and light are mesmerizing, and seem to be almost bleeding and pulsing.