The Brooklyn Rail

In New Haven, where I’ve been looking at pictures for fifteen years or more, I found myself navigating the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA)’s exhibition, J. M. W. Turner: Romance and Reality backwards. Turned around in a place so familiar, like one of Turner’s ships close to shore yet unable to achieve landing, I didn’t do it on purpose, at least not consciously. It was simply a mistake that I chose not to correct.

The exhibition shows the many periods, moods, media, and facets that made up a career, allowing the YCBA to display the wealth of its collection, the most extensive holding of Turner’s work outside of the UK. Maybe I got a little lost because, like many Turner fans, I find myself ineluctably drawn to the later works, not solely for their abstraction but also for the way, in that abstraction, Turner somehow seems to draw closest to phenomenological truth. In the late works, felt experience takes precedence over faithful rendering. The exhibition delivers plenty to suit the taste for late Turner, particularly in the generous display of watercolors. The 1840 composition, A Ship Approaching Margate Harbour in a Stormy Sea sweeps the viewer away in its frenetic activity, made most tangible through the running figure, stick-like, desperate, at the picture’s center. The comparatively diminutive late oil, Squally Weather (c. 1840–45) proves a gift: impasto built up to such a point that oil nearly resembles the opaque wax of encaustic, the color a thick marbling of greys, deep blues, and pinks. Such a staticky rendering of glorious chaos on a small scale shows Turner’s mastery and management of the sublime. He can dispense with the grandiosity of scale and still reach its effective heights. The exhibition text describes the artist as “both an idealist and a shrewd businessman”; here, the mature artist is a shrewd idealist, exploiting his technical abilities to evoke the viewer’s response as much as financial gain.

If we imagine Turner’s endings to be his beginnings, as my accidental viewing practice encouraged, we can understand the trajectory of his career in new ways—we see painterliness revert to the finish of his predecessors, especially Claude Lorrain. Of course, this is a fallacy but one that usefully disrupts the common teleological view of Turner’s career, in which the artist cannot help but be driven to genius, understood in terms of a late style that anticipates Impressionism, Expressionism, modernism. The looseness of late style can be seen in the careers of many artists from Titian to Rembrandt to the Pre-Raphaelites. The problems with an understanding that links accomplishment to lateness (and looseness) are myriad, the most grave being that greatness can only be understood in terms of proximity to the aesthetics of our own moment. Genius, according to this formulation, must be ahead of its time, which hamstrings our ability to think—let alone look—historically.

The exhibition ends (or begins?) with Turner’s “tragic vision.” What is most remarkable about this vision is not the depiction of tragic events (shipwrecks, volcanic eruptions, etc.) but rather Turner’s eye for the processes of disintegration that come in the wake of violent “wake” following Christina Sharpe’s deployment of it in her monograph, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016): “to be in the wake is to occupy and to be occupied by the continuous and changing present of slavery’s as yet unresolved unfolding.” Sharpe’s formulation bears directly and complexly upon Turner’s most famous work, housed at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, The Slave Ship (1840). But the understanding of history Sharpe offers—one that can only be measured in a “continuous and changing present”—applies to Turner’s so-called tragic works in general, which depict aftermaths that defy the resolution of pastness. Wreckers—Coast of Northumberland, with a Steam-Boat Assisting a Ship off Shore, shown at the Royal Academy in 1834, exemplifies the uneasy temporality of the aftermath. The rescue has not yet been realized, but the ship’s detritus comes ashore, pulled towards the left side of the picture by the “wreckers” who come to collect it. They pull, with flailing ropes and taut arms, against the narrative thrust of the picture, which reads like a book, left to right, ever borne towards the sea. Two tiny dogs dash across the sand, scavengers who, though belated, know more will wash ashore.

I ended with an early work, Newark Abbey (1807). The exhibition tells us that though this oil depicts a ruin, it marks Turner’s turn from antiquarian scenes. Indeed, on the right side of the painting, we have a different kind of scene—a mill and two fishermen in dress that marks them as clearly of the nineteenth century. In choosing to depict these two men in a thick, muddy brown that sets the celestial sky in relief, Turner shows himself to be, from the beginning, a painter of modern life, to borrow terms from the distinctly Modern-with-a-capital-M, Charles Baudelaire. Behind the men a fire glows within a boat, much like a tiny speck of orange will signify fire in the hull of the ship in Staffa, Fingal’s Cave (1831–32), exhibited twenty-five years later. In this way, Turner anticipates Turner. As the YCBA’s exhibition so persuasively shows, Turner is his own antecedent and his own denouement.