Mark Van Proyen reviews J.M.W. Turner: Painting Set Free at the de Young Museum, San Francisco, on view through September 20, 2015.

Van Proyen concludes: "Despite whatever claim one might want to make about the complicated relation of Turner’s work to Romanticism (for starters, his politics were of the type that would never embrace the idea of “liberty leading the people”), the important point is that Turner did something with that influence, and that thing is what we see in this exhibition. It captures the precise hinge moment where the radical subjectivity of Romanticism pivots to a new place, where artists dedicated themselves to exploring the tangible relationship between experience and the materials that would allow them to capture those experiences."