Pain, Themes and Freed - Turner’s Modern World: Painting Times of Change
By Neville Stankley
Why do people visit art galleries? The reasons can be many fold - aesthetic, cultural, social etc. A yearning for beauty coupled with a need to understand motivation, technique, and context perhaps? I would bet visitors do not go to an exhibition to learn about the Napoleonic Wars, gain a greater understanding of the industrial revolution, behold the evils of slavery, or even what it is like being tied to the mast of a ship in a storm. Yet this is the ambition of Turner’s Modern World (at Tate Britain until September 2021). The artist as chronicler, historian, and social commentator.
Fortunately for the curators, Turner wasn’t yearning for an idealised past, he was, perhaps cynically, chasing the newly wealthy and how their wealth was generated - canals, railways, piers – their, and to some extent the artist’s own, personal gain going hand in hand with the social pain this new wealth caused.
Windmill and Lock c.1811
He shows how war impacted coastal towns. He juxtaposes the new architecture of mills and towns with the buildings of the past. The contrast is clear, and the impact is startling. However, the problem with such an approach is the creation of long text labels and inevitably you feel at times like you have stepped into a particularly rich illustrated history book. Some objects are used to bring the story off the walls, and their sparing use makes their impact all the more resonant under a classic timeline that sets the history narrative front and centre.
Interestingly, Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhon Coming On) 1840, is a reproduction. The original remains in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, too fragile to move. Evidence, if needed, that in this exhibition the narrative is much more important than authenticity.
Yet, Turners greatest hits are here if you just want to marvel at the artist’s brilliance, The Fighting Temeraire 1838, Rain Steam and Speed 1844, and my personal favourite, Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth 1842, which is, as John Ruskin said, “one of the very grandest statements of sea-motion, mist and light, that has ever been put on canvas". I noted in the labelling that the artist comes to the fore in his famous paintings and the narrative becomes the sub-plot.
Rain, Steam and Speed was nicely contextualised by a model of the locomotive depicted in the piece and I felt this light touch approach to the interpretation of some paintings was a real strength of the exhibition.
Rain, Steam and Speed 1844 with model
In the end, this exhibition was so rich in historical themes that I sometimes forgot that it was being chronicled by a great artist, although his pain and the pain of society’s change comes through loud and clear. Yet, as society became increasingly unshackled from its past, so it seems did Turner when in the 1840s he began to produce critically derided works of such utter freedom and genius that will always be a pleasure to view however they are contextualised. Go and see for yourself.
Neville Stankley is the Chief Operating Officer of Culture Syndicates CIC.
Turner’s Modern World: Painting Times of Change at Tate Britain until 12 September 2021
http://culturesyndicates.co.uk
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