Tag Archives: JMW Turner

Turner in Time

Posted on by
Reply

A very wet and windy day, but the trains were running and that was enough for me. To the Whitworth for yet another Turner exhibition. This one was of Turner’s watercolours (low status compared to oil painting) from his teens to his old age – from precision to impression. I enjoyed watching the change in style as I wandered around the room and noticed how he embraced innovation (e.g. coloured paper for his watercolours). Some scenes were already familiar, like the fall of the Clyde in Lanarkshire.

As usual, there were other small exhibitions to dip into. One on trees in art, which was rather lovely, and one on abstract art, which wasn’t. Minimalism is OK, but the “messiness” of, say, Gillian Ayres means nothing to me, Well, my loss perhaps. Included in the exhibition room were fabric and textile designs from Edinburgh Weavers and Hull Traders – abstraction tamed and tidied into repeating patterns.

Turner and Constable

Posted on by
Reply

I set off for the Tate on foot and continued walking when the rain started, preferring to avoid crowds while I could for I knew the exhibition would be busy. It was indeed sold out for the day, and the cloakroom was quickly full.

The exhibition looked at Turner (b 1775) and Constable (b 1776), comparing their works and their success (the former seen at the time as “poetic”, the latter “truthful”). Turner travelled widely, portraying the sublime and maximising income from his output through his prints; Constable painted closer to home, often out of doors, trying to capture natural features and atmospheric effects as truthfully as he could. There was a sketch of Helmingham Dell which I wanted to steal: it combined the charm of poohsticks bridge with the elemental forest scenes in Hamnet. I much preferred his smaller works to his “six-footers” – paintings designed to be noticed at exhibitions. (Turner had learned that lesson early on.) It was interesting to compare Constable’s experiments with his brushwork – usually textured (which critics had divided opinions about), but occasionally smoother.

Again, I preferred Turner’s later, less finished paintings. There are only so many scenes of ravines, cliffs and castles that I can take. His unfocussed views leave more room for interpretation.

I wandered around the regular galleries too, and noted a painting of Mrs Mounter by Harold Gilman that I was sure I had seen last month at the Walker. Yes, I had – Mrs Mounter was a regular model for Gilman; I’ve even seen her in Leeds. The main hall had a selection of Jacob Epstein’s sculptures, and I was struck anew by the Rock Drill torso. Epstein changed the sculpture (originally more sinister) after WWI, amputating some of it and casting it in bronze, and the result is somehow sorrowful – almost like a Pietà with bowed head and arm reaching out in supplication.

I also spent time with William Stott of Oldham. Undemanding . . . but so lovely.

Liverpool

Posted on by
Reply

I went to see the “Turner: Always Contemporary” exhibition at the Walker, which was very good. Liverpool’s Turners have been brought together and exhibited with later 19th century and modern artists. The modern art link was a bit hit and miss; I smiled as the gallery attendant regularly asked people to stay outside the floor-taped cordon sanitaire around Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde-encased “Two Similar Swimming Forms in Endless Motion” as if she were part of some performance art. What was more interesting was comparing Turner to water scenes by Monet, Courbet and Ethel Walker. Their pictures seemed so lifeless and stilted beside Turner; somehow the mistiness of his work kept the images in motion as they came in and out of focus. I don’t think it was just a matter of fewer straight lines.

Serendipity: amongst the non-Turner paintings was one of Dordrecht, which reminded me of waterbus journeys to Rotterdam. (Turner learned from older paintings.) You could follow his move from representational landscapes (albeit ones where features were re-arranged for greater artistic impact), through his “mass” prints in the Liber Studiorum (some of which I saw in Manchester) to his later quasi-abstract paintings. J Atkinson Grimshaw also secured a spot with his paintings of Liverpool’s Custom House on the front; they are indeed wonderful, and you can see the build-up of paint in the foreground like mud on the cobbles.

Then I wandered around the rest of the Walker, venturing into galleries I barely recall visiting before. Elizabeth I by Hilliard, comparisons of Flemish and Italian Madonnas, a Rembrandt, wall after wonderful wall of 18th-century ladies and gentlemen that I didn’t have the headspace to look at individually, a Nocturne by Marchand, a view of Berne by a follower of Turner (I wonder why he didn’t make the exhibition?), and a horse painting that looked like one I had seen before.

Other things before I forget: a 1783 ceramic dish with a painting of a slaving ship, “Success to the Will”, was referenced in a modern work, “English Family China”, from 1998. They are cast from real skulls (never have the words “bone china” sounded so sinister) and implicitly comment on the link between wealth and horror. There was a painting by Joseph Wright of Derby, which, unsurprisingly, made neither the National Gallery nor this exhibition. I gazed at a lovely 15th-century Book of Hours and clocked another Beuckelaer. He must have churned them out.

The Christmas market was set up in the square outside and I contemplated a ride on the big wheel – but it was raining steadily and there was no inviting movement from the wheel, so I headed off for lunch instead.

Then the Museum of Liverpool for an exhibition on treasure unearthed in Wales and the north west of England. (A magnifying glass would have been useful.) Some of it was indeed treasure – gold or silver – but some had little value even at the time. The third-century Agden Hoard, for example – c 2,500 Roman copper alloy coins (“radiates”) from a time when galloping inflation made them almost worthless. There was also the golden Mold cape, which I have seen at the British Museum.

The sky was brighter as I left, but the big wheel was still static so I caught my train instead.

Turner and feminism

Posted on by
Reply

I was in Manchester for the day and went to the Whitworth Gallery and thus saw two contrasting exhibitions. One was Women in Revolt, which I found interesting – probably not entirely for the expected reasons. Since I do recall the 1970s and 1980s, many of the events and social attitudes were familiar to me. The artwork was punchy rather than classy – reflecting the anger of that time and the everyday media that the artists/activists used (e.g. collage, fabric). At this remove it’s easy to forget how outlandish some of the demands for female equality seemed at the time to “ordinary people” – equal pay, professional opportunities, childcare, the assumption of being taken seriously. My aunts, for example, were ambivalent to, if not dismissive of, female equality. How far we have come! No, what did catch my attention was a film of ordinary women in the street, accosted by a male television journalist and asked what problems they encountered as women in the 1970s. It was almost a Socratic dialogue: he hectoring and various shes pondering his questions, totally media-unsavvy, and giving hesitant answers about things they perhaps hadn’t considered before. There was a polite bewilderment at being asked to examine their lives, rather than the redundant-heavy easy flow of words that a vox pop today might elicit. The exhibition assumed a natural relationship between 1970s feminism and other progressive attitudes – the relationship not embraced by women in power at that time like Margaret Thatcher.

And then Turner’s prints. The Whitworth had emptied all its shelves and backs of cupboards for this. They were rather lovely, and I was impressed by the quality of the mezzotints. A very different experience.

Newcastle

Posted on by
Reply

Newcastle really is a handsome city – it announces the fact from the moment you cross the river and curve into the station. Sunshine helps, of course. It’s looking a bit pinched in other ways, but that’s another matter.

Straight to the Laing and the café, but before I had my coffee I was sidetracked by the corridor display of domestic items: a teapot by Christopher Dresser plus crockery by Laura Knight and Eric Ravilious. His little tureen was a delight.

But I wasn’t there for household items. No, I was there to see Turner’s “Fighting Temeraire”, which is on loan from the National Gallery, and the exhibition surrounding it. As I walked round I felt a small surge of horrified interest in how a battle would have been fought by sailing ships atop a wooden crate riddled with gun holes. Lots of Turner’s watercolours, which – since I know one of the scenes he painted – included a great deal of artistic licence. Sometimes his painting are too undefined and blurry for my taste, and I wasn’t expecting that much of the Temeraire. Well, I was wrong. In the flesh, it is amazing. It blazes and shimmers and is utterly beautiful. Lots of artistic licence here too, but there is still pathos in the old ship that helped to defend Britain from Bonaparte’s forces being led to her death by a new-fangled steam tug. “Burial at Sea” next to it was equally breathtaking. It just glowed.

There was more about shipbuilding and industry on the Tyne, including one photograph by Chris Killip. Afterwards I went into his exhibition of “The Last Ships”. His eye is perfect, but it is perhaps the time he spent on the people and the area that was his invisible power. These photographs of the same street over the course of a couple of years in the mid-1970s:

My room is on the fourth floor and I have a perfect view of the Ionic capitals of the old Assembly Rooms. And of the buddleia sprouting from its masonry.