From 1st July to 21st September 2008, the Metropolitan Museum in New York is housing the works by great English artist Turner. It is the greatest retrospective organized on the painter in the USA, displaying 140 of his works between paintings and water-colours.
The production has been organized in both a chronological and a thematic sense, with the purpose of showing the artist’s entire stylistic course, from his immature and academic works to his affirmed and revolutionary pictorial writing, from the themes to the places he held dearest. Therefore, there are his first canvases dominated by the Sublime and the latest ones in which light is the uncontested protagonist, represented with an increasingly evanescent and free brushstroke.
The presence of a large number of water-colours is extraordinary - this technique was applied by Turner in an innovative way - often approached to oil paintings, in order to compare a same subject represented in different forms: the quick sketch gives life to the final and meditated oil on canvas.
The first painting displayed is “Fishermen at Sea” and then Turner leads us with his most famous masterpieces through the places that he visited, such as France, Switzerland, Italy with Rome and Venice, he accompanies us on a journey in time with his canvases of historical character making us relive great deeds, such as “Hannibal crossing the Alps during a snow-storm “, and he shows us the picturesque topographical views of the English countryside.
Joseph Mallord William Turner (London 1775-Chelsea 1851) was one of the greatest English artists, skilful both in his pictorial technique and in the use of carving and of water-colours. He proved to already have great abilities from when he was very young, to the point that he was granted entrance to the Royal Academy of Arts when he was only 14 years old and was admitted at the age of 15, when he began his formation in contact with Joshua Reynolds.
The young wonder boy immediately began to be appreciated for his rigorous technique and his representation of landscapes close to the classical style of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. It was in 1796 that he exposed his first oil work Fishermen at Sea, and that moment marked for him the beginning of the annual appointment at the Academy’s exhibition next to the canvases of other great artists.
His initial academic style gradually softened as time went by, until he reached a more lyric and personal style, in which the matter crumbles, shapes dissolve and the dusty rendering of air is captured.
From being a precocious student, who studied works by great artists of the past, he became in little time an artist, with a solid background, imitated by others for his innovative technique. During his European trips, in France, Switzerland, Italy, not only he absorbed the tendencies of other cultures, but he took his own imprint with him and his way of filtering the landscape through the atmosphere and light, arousing the interest of many other artists and triggering a renewal process of the academic method.
For the English painter the supremacy of nature, as a result of the divine spirit present everywhere, had blurry and indefinite outlines, even in the moment of greater impetus: great natural disasters and atmospheric phenomena became the ideal subjects to highlight the impotence of the human being against the strength of nature and the divine character of the landscape, whose inaccessibility is represented with light fringed touches.
Turner decided that, when he died, his artistic heritage would go to the British state, so that all of his works would be displayed together in the same building. This did not happen immediately, due to the government’s stinginess, as it did not know where and how to organize a special space, and also because his latest canvases, flooded with light and without any precise spatial references, resulted to be revolutionary and not academic enough for a country that was still very attached to tradition.
Indeed, it seems that at the time some critics mocked his works, believing that it was indifferent whether they were hung up straight, oblique or even upside-down since, according to them, the same thing would have been observed, however. Luckily, some years later the English opinion on the artist’s paintings changed and that rich heritage, after so many years in the cellar, has resurfaced to be discovered worldwide.

http://www.metmuseum.org/

translated by Giorgina Arcuri