J.M.W. Turner

Turner, Monet, Twombly @ the Tate

Painter Gary Wragg records his impressions of the recent exhibition Turner, Monet, Twombly: Later Paintings at Tate Liverpool.

Wragg writes: "I am fascinated by Twombly’s compulsion, shared with many recent and current painters, for urgency, here-ness, enveloping near-ness, and close-ness, beyond composition. Concomitant with science’s understanding of the expanding evolution and nature of the universe, I find it interesting to see how the mark-making of Turner, Monet and Twombly evolved successively bigger, nearer and more emphatically tactile from one to the other over the span of three centuries. Twombly’s application of paint is more splashy, gungy and physical than Monet’s, whereas Monet’s is more systematically flattened and emphasised across the surface than Turner’s. Nowadays bonkers erratic in your face scribblings and splashings or heightened-colour-flatness stems from a very real need for possession, for being thrown out, in and around, and gripped by a simultaneously in out of kilter connectivity. The spectator becomes a magnet catching the memory of fleeting sensations of being in the studio and has an empathy with the artist working directly with painting. The overriding power of making and resolution seems to arise in spirit as much as in feeling, in the hand; it is central to the experience of most of the paintings in this exhibition, that seem of their time yet as timeless as the first handprint in pigment on a cave wall, made forty seven thousand years ago."

Turner at the Tate

Huntley Dent writes about the newly hung Turner Galleries at Tate Britain which house selections from the bequest of painter J.M.W. Turner, who left his estate, which included 30,000 works of art on paper and 300 oil paintings, to the country in 1856.

Dent writes: "The newly hung galleries can’t help but open your eyes. Turner left hundreds of unfinished paintings to the Tate and thousands of drawings and water colors, so any angle a curator wants to take can be illustrated, and still the torrent of imagination has only been caught in a teacup. At 21 and 22 Turner made his first Royal Academy pictures, both depictions of moonlight, a notoriously difficult illumination to capture on canvas. You have to lean in to squint at the astonishing detail that he has carefully inscribed in subtle shades of black and brown, a really virtuoso effect. But then, with Turner as with Paganini, one expects the virtuosic as his stock in trade. Quite literally he might do an avalanche before lunch and a cataclysm after tea while sketching in the defeat of Hannibal on the side."

Turner: In the Light of Claude

Marina Vaizey reviews the exhibition Turner Inspired: In the Light of Claude at the National Gallery, London, on view through June 5, 2012.

Vaizey notes that Turner "took from Claude the vastness of landscape, its beauty and importance, but perhaps above all, as the exhibition title suggests, the overwhelming inspiration was a Claudian illumination, the irradiating light from the sun beaming down on an idealised landscape from the centre of a limitless sky." She adds "Compared to Claude, Turner seems almost rowdy, even rambunctious."

The Age of Wonder

Christine Cariati reviews The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes.