The Curious Case of J.M.W Turner's Later Works | Raiders Of The Lost Art | Perspective

[Music] my [Music] so joseph mallord william turner was hailed as a prodigy from an early age and he went on to have a remarkably successful painting career he was incredibly well known during his lifetime and enjoyed a huge amount of success but even some of his patrons were quite confused by what came up later these experimental works would prove highly controversial amongst his contemporaries turner's work changed a lot during his lifetime he wasn't just content to keep doing the same thing he was derided for making terrible work with all sorts of unknown mixtures his work started off rather realistic and then became more and more expressionists almost abstract to many critics this was a step backwards they couldn't understand what he was doing however turner's later dramatic paintings would be adored by the impressionists and people who see them today the impressionists really looked back at his works as being pioneering turner probably was the most revolutionary british artist of the 19th century he becomes this extraordinary figure revered if you like by those who understood his work damned and dismissed by others [Music] there are still many mysteries about turner's life and even the fate of some of his works two of his paintings were stolen in frankfurt in 1994 and only a strange sequence of events managed to bring them back where they belong [Music] in 1843 when turner was 68 years old he exhibited a painting called light and color along with its companion piece shade and darkness they encapsulated the much more radical style that turner had embraced in the latter stages of his career and showed the inspiration he had taken from the theory of colors by goethe but a century and a half after these revolutionary works were first seen they would vanish from a temporary exhibition in frankfurt there was an exhibition in frankfurt on goethe's interest in colour and art and the tape gallery lent two paintings by turner major works which reflected goethe's color theory these are two late turner paintings from the period in his life when he was making these rather amazing kind of proto impressionist pieces but they're also allegorical biblical themes but they're also an argument about goethe and because of that they've been chosen to be part of an exhibition in frankfurt these two wonderful paintings were stolen along with one casper david friedrich painting which i think is sort of quite interesting the robbers stayed behind and took the paintings during the night i was director of programs at the tate and my boss was the director nicholas and he rang me early in the morning uh when carp and took this call and it was very hard to take in what he was saying which was that a message had come through that these two turner paintings had been stolen in the night and it was really hard to know almost what nick was saying it was such an appalling message but he finished that call by saying you better bring your passport to work [Music] it would be years before these turners would be seen by the public again tremendous efforts would be made to try and reclaim these key elements of turner's artistic legacy a legacy that took a long time to be fully appreciated to select combine and concentrate that which is beautiful in nature and admirable in art is as much the business of the landscape painter in his line as in the other departments of art turner was born in coffin garden london in 1775. the exact date is still unknown but there's a record of his baptism on the 14th of may although he had the first name of joseph he went by his middle name of william throughout his life turner is born in very very modest circumstances you know he's the son of a barber grows up in cobb and garden turner started drawing at a really young age we know that in 1786 he went to margate and he made some sketches of the town he was really from very small boy out and about making drawings from life and later on he went to go and visit an uncle in berkshire in a place called stunningwell and we have a whole sketchbook that exists from that time and a watercolour of oxford so his father was immensely proud of him from a very early age [Music] when turner was 12 years old his father put some of his drawings in the window of his barber's shop and they sold we know that he bragged to an artist's friend saying you know my son is going to be this amazing painter he's going to be an incredible painter so he was drawing and sketching from childhood really and then went on into the academy from 1789 the royal academy had only recently been established and was still headed by its very first president sir joshua reynolds one of turner's artistic heroes reynolds himself would head the panel that admitted the precocious young turner to the school tanner entered the school of the royal academy at the age of 14 which was very young and he was a very good student his education now would have been rather traditional a lot of drawing of the human body either from live models or from plaster cast what we do know is that he did a lot of topographical drawing on the side so he was to sort of support himself financially he recognized this need for topographical drawings and then was in the academy he first of all started um working in the plaster galleries and then moved on there's one extant self-portrait from his period as a young man there and he was very able he was just a star pupil i think from the beginning turner exhibited his first oil painting whilst at the royal academy fisherman at sea which shows a nocturnal scene on the english south coast but turner had high ambitions and traveled across europe to learn from the great masters at the best collections including the louvre he was able to achieve his dreams thanks in part to the support of walter fawkes walter fox was a yorkshire landowner who lived near leeds in wolfdale and he spotted turner's abilities early and when turner was 22 he commissioned him to do a series of watercolours of his estate force was an early patron somebody who believed in his talents and who was giving him money and buying things off him which if you're a young student just out of college is enormously exciting walter forks's home became almost a second home for turner he spent a huge amount of time there forks became really a strong patron and supporter but also just a really good friend it made somewhere for him to go outside of london turner's career went from strength to strength and he became one of the most celebrated artists of his era but despite his fame we know little about his personal life he never married but he may have had two daughters with a widow named sarah danby [Music] i hate married men they never make any sacrifices to the arts that are always thinking of their duties to their wives or families or some rubbish of that sort [Music] later in his career turner started to lose the critical praise he'd become accustomed to with work such as the fighting temeraire first exhibited in 1839 his paintings began to lose a focus on specific details and his mature style seen in snowstorm and rain steam and speed would instead highlight dramatic scenes of shimmering light critics were not impressed his work started off rather realistic and then became more and more expressionist or some of them in the later years almost abstract and of course to many critics this was a step backwards they couldn't understand what he was doing when they were first exhibited they were regarded absolutely as sort of strange and very very odd by some of the critics i mean they were sort of really uh dismissed by someone that's far too experimental he took a lot of flag and these are people who maybe supported him in his earlier career he was incredibly well known during his lifetime and enjoyed a huge amount of success but even some of his patrons were quite confused by what came up later the critics were incredibly rude there are some criticisms saying that they look like lobster salad mustard white wash soap suds so i think they were just quite bemused by these seemingly unfinished quite mad riotous paintings that were very different from what they're used to i mean they've got wonderful kind of swirls of color but of course those things that were dismissed in turner's time of later been reappraised as great masterpieces turner would persevere with his radical style and made the pioneering decision to leave his works to the british nation but this remarkable collection would suddenly be incomplete thanks to a theft in frankfurt in 1994 but efforts were being made to make the collection whole once again [Music] it is only when we are no longer fearful that we begin to create joseph mallord william turner died on the 19th of december 1851. he was buried as he'd requested at some paul's cathedral next to his hero sir joshua reynolds in an unconventional move for the time his large collection of finished paintings still in his possession were bequeathed to the british nation he left his paintings and drawings to the state which was an unusual thing to do and it was a huge amount of material there were 300 oil paintings and 30 000 drawings and watercolors turner left a lot of money a small fortune really he left some money through all academy who have since given the turn a medal and also to the national gallery which had took the large bulk of his paintings um which we now know in the tate in the claw wing there have been occasions through 18th 19th and certainly in 20th century when artists have done wonderful things of donating works but turner was determined not just to kind of leave a few paintings but to really leave the very best we were lucky to have this bequest but he also wanted to make sure that his life's work was going to be looked after was going to be kept together and that people could learn from it and see what a great artist he was i mean i think he was very interested in that whole idea of being somebody who had been breaking new ground i think to leave that body of work his entirety of his career to the state was really something special was unique and and something that was unprecedented indistinctness is my forte only two decades after turner's death his paintings found a whole new group of devotees on the continent the impressionists who were particularly taken with his later works that had once proved so controversial [Music] in terms of mindset we can definitely see that turner was a real precursor to the impressionist he was looking at natural effects atmosphere light effects changing feelings during the day shadow darkness light how color affects the renderings of what you're seeing so it was really a similar approach and it was definitely a precursor and we know that some of the impressionists will have seen his work it was monet in particular who discovered turner monet fled to london in 1870 because of the franco-prussian war and during this period he became interested in british artists not surprisingly and above all turner we know that he was heavily influenced by turner as well as whistler another artist again he was looking at the effect of light and color and atmosphere at different times of the day and this obviously with his series became completely intrinsic to monet's work monet seemed to really knuckle down and done quite a lot of work i mean there are a number of paintings that show london at the time which are very exciting [Music] the direct influence on the emerging impressionist movement is clear however some art historians have speculated that part of turner's output could even be seen as expressionist [Music] he was capturing a moment capturing the weather capturing the feel of how it was to be in something how much that was in in his mind and expressing his own feelings it's hard to tell but he was definitely an expressionist in the terms of capturing what it felt like to be in that very moment there's quite a lot of angst and turmoil in there literally and he's obviously very very interesting in replicating huge storms and big seas and that sort of clashing nature those are very expressive things whether he was expressing a sort of internal world it's hard to know what we do know is that he was trying to express what it felt like to be there he did work from his preparatory sketches onto larger canvases but he was really trying to recall the atmosphere the effects everything that he was looking at around him when he was drawing in time turner attained the status of britain's greatest ever painter but in 1994 there was great fear that his full collection of works would forever remain incomplete when light and color as well as its companion piece shade and darkness were stolen from the kunsala chern in frankfurt the two missing paintings were especially important as they illustrated turner's fascination with the writing of goethe on the theory of colors color theory which was quite new uh was that he was looking at the sort of physiological effects of color how they affected your mood how color was perceived from the individual rather than the way that every eye sees color so he was challenging newton he was challenging theories that had gone before and really looking at color through a different perspective turner became increasingly interested in the effects of light on the landscape and the challenge of depicting it in paint and interestingly enough he titled some of his paintings after expressions that gerta used [Music] the two paintings that were stolen from the gerta exhibition in frankfurt had been on loan from the tate gallery london [Music] they're very important because they were part of the turnover quest so they're part of those paintings that turner himself decided should be donated by him to the nation um so they were of the highest importance within turner's work they were actually on loan to the gallery from the tate and the thieves broken and they found themselves almost entrapped in the museum and ended up clambering over the guards essentially and getting out one of them was on the poster for the exhibition so at one point i thought well you know did the thieves take it because it was publicized it was just on the post it was very hard to know and initially we at the tape were very much waiting you know was this going to be a political thing was somebody going to be coming up for a ransom demand in a very immediate sense or using this some kind of almost hostage-taking you don't know one was thrown so completely so far outside my experience or actually any of our experience of those of us working at the tate i just didn't know what was going to happen next [Music] it would be five years since sandy nan received his initial early morning phone call and with the painting still no closer to being found it was feared that they might be lost forever i think in the first five years it's fair to say that there certainly wasn't a day that went by without thinking about the turnip paintings but i wasn't dealing with it all the time because there was nothing to deal with and it was really only after five years that an opportunity came about there was a lot of false leads a lot of stuff came through german lawyers would ring up say oh i think i've got somebody who might know something that person might need a small fee to begin to start a conversation none of it led to anything um but of course you kept hoping the frankfurt authorities had actually caught the thieves but those thieves once charged and convicted had no information about the location of the paintings and then once the authorities knew that the paintings had seemed to have been handed on to others they allowed us to work they gave a kind of special status to a particular german lawyer uh harry brooks and it was through him that there was just the possibility of if a fee for information leading to recovery could be paid then there was the possibility that the paintings might come back the paintings were insured for 24 million pounds which was paid to the tate as a result of the disappearance the tate however decided that they would buy back the titles of the paintings from the insurance company in order for them to remain in their possession if they were ever recovered this would prove pivotal as sandy would receive information which would take him back to frankfurt in the hope of recovering one of the paintings i had with me the uh head of paintings conservation from dayton actually we've been about to leave we were so fed up of nothing happening after days of waiting and then eventually got this call from lee brooks saying you should come come now and we went back into frankfurt went back to his office there was a painting on the table and it was fantastic i mean it was a completely joyous moment of thinking after years he was one of them because he was only one and then we had to work on the second the first painting to be recovered was shade and darkness in july 2000 but it would be another two years before sandy would recapture the second i presumed that it'd be another six months that we'd get the second one the same people we had to keep it quiet eventually we got new information so then we set up another operation december 2002 and we had the same amazing moment of being there again with head of painting conservation to check it and there was without a scratch out of the frame no longer in the frame but still on that stretcher without a scratch for me there was huge relief to have spent eight and a half years and to know that these could go back on show as parts of the national turn of a quest be available again to a proper public that was what was so exciting the immediate feeling in the art world was great relief that the paintings had come back they belonged to a public collection they were very important part of turner's bequest but very quickly people realize that it could cause a dangerous precedent and might encourage um thieves to steal from galleries so there is that concern there's a question of saying what was the tate's duty and in my view and it was confirmed in law that was the duty to get them back and to pay a fee for recovery the two paintings now reside back in their rightful home as property of the nation just as turner had wished despite their turbulent past both works continue to be shared with other institutions around the world allowing millions to enjoy the output of a true modern master

Channel: Perspective

Views: 130,920

Keywords: Academic Art, Ancient Artworks, Antique Paintings, Art Criticism, Art Deal, Art Mysteries, Controversial Art, Fine Arts, Historical Paintings, Impressionist Movement, Masterpiece Collection, Modernist Paintings, Museum Exhibit, National Gallery, Old Masters, Perspective, Precious Artworks, Raiders of the Lost Art, Restored Masterpiece, Turner's Technique, Valuable Paintings

Id: e0ljw-6NqUs

Length: 21min 43sec (1303 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 29 2020