The Power of Art: Turner 藝術的力量: 泰納

damn em all may 1840 the annual exhibition of the Royal Academy in London has been a great success on display all the reviewers agree is one indisputable masterpiece painted by Edwin Landseer it's called laying down the law and it features as the learner judge a poodle it is the critics chorus perfect perfect in execution taste and refinement but there's another painting hanging in the 1840 show about which the critics are also absolutely an animus in dismay and scorn jmw Turner's slaveship how is it that we can see a masterpiece while the critics compared it to a kitchen accident or the contents of a spittoon had Turner gone over the top with this voyage into a sweaty nightmare this fantastical image of slaves cruelly murdered at sea why had a work Turner had hoped would make people weep instead move them to describe it as a detestable absurdity what was it about this particular painting the consummation of Turner's career that brought down on his head such a storm of abuse we all think we know Turner don't we he seems as comfortably British as a cup of tea he is after rule the National Gallery's all-time favorite but there was another Turner the Turner you don't know the painter of chaos conflagration and apocalypse wild and ambitious paintings that one critic called a picture of nothing and very like well this is my turn extreme term the cockney poet just short of madness the Turner we ought to know the Turner we really ought to Revere this time was on a delirious visionary trip that would culminate in the greatest British painting of the 19th century the slave ship why as very forty years before the heroic Fiasco of the slave ship young Turner could do no wrong in his twenties the barber son had already been tipped as the next great thing in British painting with a dab of his brush he could wave fairy dust over the genteel British countryside and it would turn into a place of sublime enchantment and the quality ate it up Britain was fighting for its life against the French and the romance of Albion had never been deeper into the national imagination Tanna meanwhile have been granted a great honour fellowship of the Royal Academy at just 26 now he had to present them with a picture to mark his entry he gave them this which was to say a shock dole badan castle in Snowdonia was wear a medieval Welsh Prince Owen Gogh but met his end in reality it was just a modest pile of stones on a hillside but Tanner pumps up the melodrama backlights the desolate crag so that the castle becomes a personification of the defiant prince himself the tragic symbol of imprisoned Liberty just in case people didn't get it he added a little power how awful is the silence of the way--the where nature lifts her mountains to the sky majestic solitude behold the tower where hapless owen long imprisoned pined and wrung his hands for liberty in vain okay so it's not exactly cute but it is Turner reaching for the epic it's all about atmospherics not finicky topographical description because that's what britain was for Turner a biological sentiment and instinct in the blood an irresistible operatic arrangement of lights air and water elemental heroic legend dream the painting smoothed the way for the young man into the ranks of the Academy but it should have put everyone on notice that this was a painter who'd never settle for the charming and the pretty Turner could have made a perfectly decent living raking it in from the pleasure and leisure industry but in his fertile imagination something grand and bloody was already stirring but he still had a fortune to make he wasn't ready yet to be the maker of dark epics it was time to enjoy being JMW Turner RA he's rolling in money and commissions and he buys a Western house for his pictures himself and his old dad whom he shamelessly turns into his all-purpose servant Oh dad would stretch and prime canvases old dad would patrol the gallery old dad would tend the vegetable garden out by the river and revel in his son's fame and fortune good old dad but then conventional family ties don't seem to mean much to Turner there's no dutiful mrs. T at home marriage and art don't go together he said so instead he takes as a lover the widow of a friend Sarah Danby and installs her around the corner he even has two children by her more illicitly still sara is the muse of his erotic imagination his drawing suggests he takes as much pleasure in sex as a full moon over butter Mia it wasn't until Turner's will was published that anyone knew about Sarah Danby and the children and the erotica remains strictly under wraps in his lifetime Turner chose to live part of his life omits the shadows of secret fantasies but when he emerged from this world and strolled beside the Thames he indulged in another fantasy she lived in a country from which poverty hunger and misery have been banished Turner's Thames was the place where the romance of England came to him with lyrical intensity a place of almost narcotic serenity this is the pleasure seeking public pleasing Turner and perhaps he could have settled for this mellow dreamworld gently stroking the self-satisfaction of Regency England but even as he drifted through his home counties even Tana must have been aware that alongside this it'll there was another England in England in distress and something interna wanted to paint that England - so this was the early 1800s the rockiest years in all modern British history the time when the distance between the fantasy Britain and the reality was at its widest the kingdom was supposed to be a model of political and social stability but there was massive unemployment hunger anger rick burning in the countryside machine smashing in the towns the bloody war with Napoleon's France grinding on and on these are hard times radical times you so Tana produces a gritty image of rough Britannia what's your most delicious fantasy of Old England summertime a picnic well here's a heart bitten winter dawn that is no picnic a shot hair slung around the shoulders of a girl rutted tracks two men digging a ditch or is it a grave you can feel the tough work of it in that hard frozen soil everything impassive unsentimental to a how things really are Wendi constable ever do winter in the north why would Turner ever do something so flinty well in Yorkshire he has become best mates with someone who will change the way he sees the world water Forks his view of Britain isn't exactly rose-tinted and he's not your usual country gent he is a political militant the scourge of the old Tory establishment but the cause that's most stare to this radical Toth is the great moral crusade of the day the abolition of the slave trade forks his fury seeped into Turner's imagination one day in 1810 Turner took folks his son for a walk on the auction Mars as a storm brewed the two of them sketch away Turner puts his pencil down there hawky he says in two years you'll see this and it'll be called Hannibal crossing the Alps so a school over the Yorkshire Moors turns into a no-holds-barred Alpine Cataclysm a simultaneous blizzard and a shaft of sickly son Hannibal's army is the victim as it clambers it's painful way over the Alpine passes stragglers picked off by scary mountain men while a sucking vortex hovers over the scene like some gigantic malevolent bird of prey Turner does something tremendous with the storm of the Yorkshire Moors it's not just scenic whether it's a cosmic reckoning Hannibal is a hit people crowded round us so densely the gents couldn't elbow their way in to see it but why did this picture pull in the crowds not because it was a scene from ancient history but because everybody knew it was also a modern painting a contemporary story the comeuppance handed out to another arrogant invader who cross the Alps in search of glory the archenemy Napoleon in a crushing put-down Turner shrinks the mighty commander to a puny almost comical figure in the remote background atop an elephant that looks more like a dung beetle you you have to say this about Turner though he is an equal-opportunity pessimist as much as he wants to see the end of Napoleon he's got a damn funny way of celebrating Waterloo in 1817 does he paint victorious Wellington and his gallant scarlet squares of embattled grenadiers 'he's no he gives us a carpet of corpses in the blackness wives and sweethearts with their babies pathetically searching the carnage for their loved ones an apparition of pure hell rather than glorify the iron Duke it seems to exemplify one of his Pythias verdicts the next worst thing to a battle lost is a battle one no wonder it wasn't until the 1980s that this painting was properly displayed Turner's refusal to beat the patriotic drum or wag the flag cost him patrons but with the field of Waterloo he's reached for something profound a British art that will act out the suffering of victims but then Turner knows all about the loss of the common people he's no gentleman artist he was born and grew up in the filthy back alleys of Covent Garden where every day he rubbed shoulders with a desperate and the destitute this didn't make his Waterloo or any of his historical epics manifestos for revolution they are bigger more disturbing than that they have washing through them the tragic truth about the powerlessness of ordinary people when faced with atrocity and disaster people who existed right on the edge and there was someone in his own life who'd gone right over it his mother Mary Turner was a shrieking fury in the painters house driven mad perhaps by the death of Turner's younger sister in 1800 she was incarcerated in bedlam disappearing from his life and dying four years later in total neglect but if Turner abandoned her could there have been I wonder a haunting was Mary's howling rage translated into the dark Thunder and burning gold of Turner's skies this much I can say such an acute tragic sense of the frailty of human existence frame Turner's life and powers the greatest of his words so the figures who populate his history Aging's are often weirdly invertebrate so many rag dolls tossed around by the immense forces of fate painting these discarded marionettes was particularly willful for someone who'd studied academic finger drawing but then despite the fact he's been a fellow of the Academy for nearly 20 years Turner was proving to be the odd man out in the place safe world of British art it's not just what he paints that gets him into trouble with high-class critics it's the way he paints it one critic despairs that Turner delights in abstractions that go back to the first chaos of the world well my dears what would you expect from the grubby little parvenu with his downmarket accent and his upmarket house there's something obstinately course that clings to him a pungent social aroma when Turner visits France the painter dellacroix is taken aback that he looks rather like farmer with unwashed hands oh there's dirt under Turner's nails all right but it's likely to be gamboge yellow or Prussian blue not far muck and the worst thing is that he seems to wear his unwashed hands like a badge of professional pride when a young gentleman aspirant artist comes to see him Turner grabs his lily-white hands and growls you're no artist Tanna himself uses his fingers to make his art keeps a nail deliberately untrimmed so he could wield it like a claw to cut into the paint surface his no dainty brush flicker he wipes and scrapes attacks the surface with a pumice stone spits into the paint and gives it a good smush it's this joyous merchan light wallowing in the muck and slather of paint that Turner's critics found so appalling and one of them complained about his perpetual need to be extraordinary well yes how very unwritten but Tanner didn't want to be boxed in by what Britain was becoming an empire of solid prosaic commercial facts he needed something more a place where the poetic imagination could drift and float there was one place where not being sound or solid was of the essence Venice for 20 years off and on Turner made the floating city his soul mate Turner was spellbound and conjured from a wispier adorn their the gauzy radiance of the place Turner's critics accused him of the cardinal sin of indistinctness but here in the floating city where everything was liquid and slippery he could embrace that indistinctness making his own particular glory you you Turner could have been tranquilized by vellus seduced into becoming an accomplished supplier of sensuous bliss but the stagnant beauty of the city made him think of something else he looked at Venice and he saw death for most of his life Turner had been the picture of rude health now he's sick losing weight wheezing he feels the grip of the ancient story of life and death in his very own bones mortality eats away at him his indispensable multitasking old dad had died not just his personal jack-of-all-trades but his best friend other cherished intimates Walter Fawkes the old radical had gone to to keep the aches and pains at bay he uses a tincture of thorn apple to cope a narcotic which probably sends his always hyperactive visual imagination into planetary orbit and from his bad dreams gallops a biblical horror and I loved and beheld a pale horse and his name that sat on him was death and hell followed with him but Turner paints his way out of the nightmare look closely the skeleton is limp death is dead Tanner lives to paint on he won't limply surrender like some consumptive romantic instead he gathers his energies puts his obsession to work makes the cycle of life and death suffering and salvation the theme of his greatest period of painting his deep into his middle age when he stares at the waves pounding the coast of Kent he feels that rhythm of destruction and creation now lárgate might not seem to you much love place to brood on historical destiny but for Turner it was definitely more than just seaside ozone and stroll along the beach the sea becomes something more for me carrier of power and wealth it's the stage on which the drama of British history gets played out sometimes that drama is fierce and turbulent sometimes it's a comforting story for revolutionary times so in the painting he calls his old darling he gives us romantic wistfulness for the veteran battleship of Trafalgar the fighting Temeraire the vessel is restored fictitiously to one last heroic farewell voyage before being broken arm in Turner's picture its masts are still standing its sails fold but the little steam power tug that pulls it isn't some sort of modern villain it's simply a fact of life in the new britain a nation in upheaval as the Industrial Revolution gathers momentum and Tanner has perfect pitch for a British public torn between affection for the past and anticipation of the future it's so emotionally versatile this picture that it lets you indulge whatever mode takes you feel like an elegy well fine then this can be the sunset of Nelson's England just made a lot of money from an industrial patent and feeling good fine again this is the sunrise of your new industrial empire but Turner's restless imagination won't settle for poignant gentleness he knows the truth is more tumultuous and that the sea has terrible tales to tell in the late 1830s one issue galvanized British morale outraged more than any other slavery Britain had outlawed slavery throughout the empire but in the Hispanic empires and the United States it not only survived but thrived in 1840 in London an international convention of the great and good was planned to express righteous indignation at this fact Turner initiated into the cause so many years ago by his patron water Forks wanted to have his say in paint and how does he do it by being a thorn in the side of self-congratulation Turner reaches back 60 years to resurrect one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the British Empire 1781 the British slaver the song was off the coast of Jamaica after a routinely profitable journey from Africa but deep below decks there was trouble slaves were dying but more than a usual rate and the ship's master Luke Collingwood suddenly had a business disaster on his hands his human cargo was insured but the underwriters would only pay up if the casualties could be accounted for as losses and see not dead on arrival so captain Collingwood went below decks and began the merciless business of selecting which slaves he would swiftly turn into losses at sea 132 Africans men women and children their hands and feet fettered were thrown overboard into the shark-infested waters of the Caribbean the moral horror of the case of the Somme was the moment when thousands of Britons abandoned their indifference and became campaigners against the slave trade a hundred and thirty two Africans perished horribly but a mass movement was born from their martyrdom Turner's approach to this appalling tragedy was not that of a literal historical illustrator what the great enchanter the canvas wanted was Prospero like to summon an apocalypse a typhoon the slave ship pitches us into the midst of a feverish dream of catastrophe and terror sin and retribution the silhouetted ship almost engulfed in the erotic spray as both a real vessel and something cursed and haunted like the ship of the Ancient Mariner waves cease with monsters kind of obscene piranha like nibbling and gobbling and the oncoming fishy monster is not to be caught off the coast of Jamaica but off the canvas live here on him as Bosh hell in high water of course it has its imperfections all that flailing flurry of action in the foreground the mysteriously floating iron fetters the flung limb that may or may not be detached from its torso all the frantic fishy action could seem to fussily staged in the end there's only one test that matters you come into the room you fix it in your sights does it or does it not attack you in the guards it does does your heart charm to your eyes white is your pulse race do your feet get a bad attack of Lib boots you're so struck down by it they do for Tanner has drowned you in this moment pulled you into this terrifying chasm in the ocean drenched you in his bloody light exactly the hue you sense on your blood filled optic nerves when you close your eyes in blinding sunlight though almost all of his critics believe that the slavers represented an all-time low in Turner's reckless disregard for the rules of art it was in fact his greatest triumph in the sculptural carving space for none of the stormy atmospherics the great pinwheel fury of reds and gold's would have the impact they did were it not for that deep trough Turner has cut in the ocean which at the center of the painting makes the blackly heaving swells stand still as though the wrathful hand of Jehovah suddenly passed over the boiling waters for this is a day of martyrdom retribution and judgment but also a scene Turner must have optimistically thought a vindication it would be a sin redeemed slavery would be defeated there is after all a patch of clearing blue at the top right corner of the painting the critics went to town Turner became the butt of jokes a crackpot old loon lost in the tempest with his ridiculous painting and it's even more ridiculous for title slavers slaveship throwing over the dead and dying typhoon coming on punch magazine joined in the chorus of cackles lampooning Turner by inventing a painting with the title a typhoon busting ass immune over a whirlpool Maelstrom Norway a ship on fire and eclipse with the effect of a lunar rainbow you but punch and all the other hi-hat critics miss the one overwhelming point which makes this the greatest British picture of the 19th century the perfect match between message and form the payoff of the slaves martyrdom would in the end be freedom so Tana has given himself glorious freedom with his brush and with his collar and with his imagery to convey the power of the sacred moment two years after the dead bark of the slave ship a young Scottish of Myra William Leighton leach visited Turner's house in Queen Anne Street he'd heard that the Turner gallery was in disrepair but nothing could possibly have prepared Leach for the squalor I walked backwards and forwards in the gallery feeling cold and uncomfortable there was no sound to be held but the rain splashing through the broken windows upon the floor leach stood in the evil-smelling gloom as he peered at Turner's most recent work among which was hanging somewhere the Scarlet explosion that was the unsold unwanted unloved slave ship he felt more and more depressed but this was the moment when the country's favorite painter once revered as the patriarch of British art was written off as a scene our lunatic yet the effects of the critical onslaught is to make it more not less brave he's off on his own now the solitary Merida on a completely uncharted ocean alongside all these scenes of oceanic turmoil Turner was still capable of painting images of exquisite liquid calm but you had the feeling he could do those in his sleep it's when his whirlpool of paint resolves itself in something greater mightier than the entertainment of the senses when he reaches towards the truths of history and eternity that I think Turner is at his greatest that's when he changes not just British art but all of art most completely and you know this is why Turner still matters to us and always will that old cockney geezer in his battered hat filthy co-transporter somewhere where the slick conformist would never dare to go into the eye of history storm into the ocean of light to find out more about simon Shamas power of art visit pbs.org simon Shamas power of art is available on DVD for forty nine ninety eight a companion book is available for $50 to order call 1-800 three three six one nine one seven or write to the address on your screen

Channel: Sam Yan

Views: 46,203

Keywords: The Power of Art, Art (Collection Category), Joseph Mallord William Turner, J. M. W. Turner (Author), 藝術的力量, 泰納, 藝術, 力量, Power, Art

Id: tO2EzumziDk

Length: 53min 55sec (3235 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 07 2014