Joseph Mallord William Turner M. W. Turner (1775-1851) was one of Britain's greatest artists, a witness to the Industrial Revolution, witnessing the replacement of the sail by steam, the replacement of manpower by machines, and the upheaval of war, political upheaval, and social reform.
The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, USA, is exhibiting "Turner's Modern World," featuring more than 100 works that explore how Turner perceives these changes more quickly than his contemporaries and captures the arrival of a new world in an innovative style of painting.
Exhibition site
Turner's life is highly regarded, and today the Tate Gallery in the UK has a gallery dedicated to a large number of works he has bequeathed to the UK. The Intrepid Dragged to Disintegration (1839, National Gallery collection) depicts an outdated warship, rolling its sails and facing the setting sun, a work that repeatedly led the British "My Favorite Painting" poll and is equally well-known in the United States. In the novel "Little Women" by American writer Louisa May Olcott, the youngest daughter Amy loves to paint and has tried to paint Turner's sunset. Some of Turner's most important oil paintings are currently in the collection of the United States.
Turner was born in 1775, when England was in the midst of georgian times, and died in 1851, under the reign of Queen Victoria. During this period, the Western world experienced the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Era, the Waterloo War, the expansion of the British Empire and the American Revolution; Turner himself experienced the social, political and technological upheaval brought about by the Industrial Revolution, the coal-powered steam engine changed the rural transportation and manufacturing industry connected by rail, and the air was filled with soot, which provided an important visual theme for Turner.
The exhibition "Turner's Modern World", jointly organized by the Tate Museum in the United Kingdom, the Kimbell Art Museum in the United States and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, brings together more than 100 oil paintings, watercolors and drawings, showing how he is committed to depicting the major events of his time and reflecting social changes in his works.
Turner, Rhine Falls in Schaffhausen, 1805-1806,
Contradictions and surprises abound in the exhibition. The huge and naturally powerful Rhine Falls in Schaffhausen (1805-1806) dominates the early works in the exhibition hall, suggesting that Turner could have focused his attention on landscapes that had not been interfered with by modernity, flattening the paint with a palette knife so that the water flow showed the outline of a boulder, showing the simplicity of man under nature. Shipyards, glowing lime kilns, Brighton Docks, and the aftermath of shipwrecks, the Battle of Trafalgar, the Battle of Waterloo, and the fires of the Houses of Parliament testify to Turner's penchant for timely subject matter. Some of these images were seen by Turner with his own eyes, and some were constructed according to eyewitness descriptions. For example, "The Battle of Trafalgar from the Mast of Victory" was written after he visited the ship "Victory" that was being repaired.
Turner, The Battle of Trafalgar from the Mast of victory, 1806-1808, Tate Gallery, Uk
Rich colors, dramatic lighting effects, and bold use of paints convey dramatic effects. The burning Houses of Parliament were shrouded in a pale ochre and orange, radiating flames and reflections; the scene of the royal banquet blended with large swathes of red and gold washes, dotted with a fragile chandelier; the weary Nelson, slumped on the crowded deck of the Victory.
Turner, Battlefield of Waterloo, 1818
Turner also focuses on the themes of war and peace, depicting contemplation and coexistence with color and light. In the shadowy Battlefield of Waterloo (1818), survivors desperately search for their loved ones, and the light in her hand reveals piles of corpses. The dimensions of Turner's work are so rich that it's hard to believe they came from the same artist, but they have different purposes: to please customers, to gain royal favor, to show extraordinary imagination and adventurous spirit.
Turner, The Slave Ship (Slaves Throw dead people into the sea), 1840, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
At the heart of the exhibition is Turner's liberal advocacy and sympathy for the abolitionist movement. The Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Slave Ship, is an exposé and indictment of the evil of the slave trade. Turner mixes the sun, the red puffy clouds, and the blood-colored sea as the main body of the picture, and puts the three-masted ship of slave trafficking in the far reaches, and the gorgeous and subtle light illuminates the shackles in the waves. Originally owned by the British literary critic John Ruskin, he once commented: "Purple and blue, the heavy waves, are drowned in the hazy night, creating a gloomy and cold atmosphere, as if the shadow of death has quietly covered this evil ship that travels in the light of the sea... His bold ideas, the most bizarre imaginations, are completely based on life, but more typical than life. ”
Later, "Slave Ship" was bought by an American and entered the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1876. As foreshadowed by Turner's other most expressive Romantic painting, The Disaster at Sea (shipwreck of the Amphitrit, circa 1835, probably unfinished). In the event of a shipwreck, the captain refused to provide rescue and abandoned the female prisoners on board.
Turner, A Tribute to Venice, 1840-1845, Tate Collection, Uk
"Unfinished" is another key word in the exhibition, and some of Turner's late works have so few shapes and colors that they look like abstract paintings to today's audience. But these sparse watercolors are turner's personal research, and he does pure, light-focused experiments on canvas that he did not plan to exhibit, and if it is to be exhibited, Turner will add details directly to the scene before the exhibition open day. In his later years, Turner also had some radical works, such as The Tempest: The Steamship Leaves the Harbor (1842), in which he used spiraling darkness and the explosion of light to era to remove the boundaries between water and sky and pull himself out of the times; various pigments were piled up to remind people of the later Courbet; and the atmospheric expression was Whistler's abstract expressionism.
Turner, "The Tempest: The Steamship Leaves the Harbor," 1842, Tate Collection, England
Note: This article is compiled from the Wall Street Journal's Karen Wilkin review of the exhibition, which will run until July 10.
More works on display:
Turner, Bell Tower in the Venetian Moonlight, 1840, Watercolor on Paper, Tate Collection, UK
Turner, Fingal Caves on Staffa Island, circa 1831-1832, collection of the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut
Turner, "Election of Northampton, 6 December 1830", circa 1830-1831
Turner, Coal Harbor in the Moonlight, 1835, Collection of the National Museum of Washington, D.C
Turner, The Great Fire at the Houses of Parliament (Vista), William Turner, 1834-1835, Collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art
Exhibition site