After Turner
J.M.W. Turner continues to exert a singular gravitational pull on artmaking and art history. On the 250th anniversary of his birth, this panel reconsiders the many afterlives of Turner’s work, seeking to understand anew the cultural forms that have developed in its wake. At each moment that artists and critics have shifted in their focus—from national canon-formation to genealogies of modernism, to social histories of industrial modernity, to post-imperial critique and ecological revisioning—a new Turner has been adduced to address the present’s shifting grounds. Rather than settle his legacy into any final shape, the panel will seek to understand the necessarily fragmented and unstable nature of Turner’s effects from his lifetime into the present: how he has slipped in and out of timeliness, how artists have echoed and inverted the models of artmaking he advanced, and how critics have wrestled with the daunting heterogeneity of his art. Accordingly, the session addresses various facets of art after Turner: artistic responses, historiographic episodes, critical encounters, experimental genealogies.The aim on this major anniversary is neither to tame Turner’s intractability, nor to shore up the centrality of his art, but instead to open art history to the dispersions and displacements that have become so much a part of Turner’s afterlives.
Session Convenors:
Richard Johns, University of York
Jeremy Melius, University of York
Nicholas Robbins, University College London
Speakers:
Nicholas Robbins, University College London, and Jeremy Melius, University of York
Introduction: After Turner
David Russell, University of California, Los Angeles
Turner at the Crossroads: Modern Painters 5
This paper will identify a crucial turning point in the development of John Ruskin’s work in the late 1850s, as he joins his criticism of the image to his criticism of society. It will focus on Modern Painters,volume 5 (1860). This volume, which is well known by critics to develop a darker or more tragic social vision, begins on a major environmental scale, and it culminates in a dramatic and focused reinterpretation of the painter who was the impetus for Ruskin’s entire project of Modern Painters: J.M.W. Turner.
My paper will read the handling of Turner in Modern Painters 5 as offering an acceleration of urgency of Ruskin’s critical mode – one which is founded on a particular relationship to time and the image. In his revisioning of some particular images of Turner’s in Modern Painters 5, Ruskin places them in relation to deep temporal patterns of destruction and tragedy (particularly in relation to Ancient Greece), even as he offers a renewed focus on the urgent present and transience of art. This recurring movement of acceleration, between deep time and present change becomes, I argue, a characteristic strategy of Ruskin’s criticism. After offering a reading of this transition as Ruskin applies it to Turner, this paper concludes by identifying and commenting on the use of this strategy as it appears in characteristic moments of Ruskin’s later social criticism.
Caroline Arscott, Courtauld Institute of Art, and Clare Pettitt, University of Cambridge
J.M.W. Turner and Thomas Hardy: Beyond the Optical
This paper explores the ways in which, in the later Victorian period, an unprecedented non-optical Idyll can be seen to tally with a re-reading of Turner. We focus on Thomas Hardy whose approach to rustic life and the resources of fiction was startling. We argue that in The Return of the Native (1878) he embarks on an exploration of the non-optical. Hardy’s evocation of the space of the heath in that novel is considered in light of his remarks on the approach to the real in Turner’s late paintings.
J.M.W. Turner’s well-documented commitment to locating poetic or epic resonances in landscape was consonant with expectations traditionally attached to the Idyll. His later work offered challenges to viewers seeking the standard components of Idyllic landscape, eliciting critical fury. We argue that, by 1878, a reframing of the Idyll made it possible for Hardy to look back at Turner’s perplexing late work. He considered that Turner was far from abandoning an approach to nature. Indeed, he welcomed Turner’s ‘non-optical’ naturalism in the late work.
In Return of the Native, Hardy shows that on the heath daily life entails an amplified consciousness of the processes of life and the sweetness of organic being, and correlative pain and annihilation. The novel explores the scope and some paradoxical features of a post-1860s Idyll. We conclude that Hardy read back into Turner’s project, intuiting that what he termed ‘the much decried, mad, late-Turner rendering’ amounted to a project to revise the Idyll.
Elisa Tamarkin, University of California, Berkeley
The Phenomenology of Looming
Herman Melville spent decades reading extensively about paintings and etchings and also collecting prints with a dedication that is unparalleled among literary authors in the nineteenth century, except maybe for Goethe, whom he also read with dedication. The talk looks at Moby-Dick as a work filtered through Melville’s ideas of visuality, while thinking again about the experiences that informed his visions, most of all pictures by Turner. Melville is concerned with exactly how visions appear; I suggest that making sense of his novel requires exposure to certain principles of colour, luminosity, brightness, and translucency, and to tonal values and relations, and how these make certain things visible to us while leaving others in obscurity.
Most of all, I am interested in how the visual principles he discovered in Turner came to matter to Melville and to questions about the relationship between perception and consciousness that his novel takes up. The problem of what surfaces, rather than sinking or subsiding—also the conditions under which anything ever surfaces—become in Melville a reflection on nothing less than the workings and difficulty of consciousness itself. I hope to focus on passages in Melville and paintings by Turner that try to isolate the very moment of visibility in which something we had never been capable of perceiving comes into awareness, unconcealed, like never before.
Eric Rosenberg, Tufts University
The End of Perspective: Dorothy Mead, The Slade, J.M.W. Turner, Greenwich and Painting in Postwar Britain in 1958
Refusing to take the Slade College of Art’s mandatory Perspective exam in 1958, Dorothy Meade was denied her degree but concocted her own test of the continued value of such requirements for painting in postwar Britain. With J.M.W. Turner’s 1809 London From Greenwich Park clearly in mind, Mead, by way of her View of River from Greenwich, offered a similarly positioned account of the extent to which surrendering the anchor insuring painting’s brief since the fifteenth century might still result in a version of material experience historically resonant and cognizant of precedent and archetype, while critically modern and dialectically uncertain about the past, yet unavoidably embodied in Turner’s proximity.
Mead’s chosen site of visuality offered itself up as a terrain of degraded tradition at the very same moment. Greenwich’s long held and seemingly impermeable means of measuring time, space, even reason and rationality were at the very same moment called into question in the face of the recent closing of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, mooted as early as 1948 and coming to pass in 1957.
Mead asserted her independence from the establishment pedagogies imposed on her by the Slade’s demands of technical mastery, rendering Turner’s example a token of the state’s past, a last gasp of imperial prospect undone by modernity’s forces of negation, abstraction, relativity and atomization, while calling up as precedent the extent to which the older British painter himself complicated the modern by increasingly questioning his own past and the dominant expectations of his moment.
Nicole Cochrane, Tate Britain
The Museum of Modern Art and the Invention of Turner as a Modern Artist
In March 1966 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York unveiled a bold exhibition, different from any it had mounted before. Turner: Imagination and Reality presented an unprecedented number of works by J.M.W. Turner from the Tate collection in London, along with significant loans from US public collections to present the artist in a new light. The brainchild of art historian and curator Lawrence Gowing, it was the first exhibition at the MoMA to display works by a historic artist. The space presented Turner not as an example of a bygone era of art, but as an artist at the vanguard of modernism. It is perhaps most known for being the moment artist Mark Rothko, invited to view the exhibition with Tate Director Norman Reid, uttered the phrase, ‘that man Turner, he learnt a lot from me’.
Exploring the 1966 MoMA exhibition as a pivotal shift in the way in which the art of Turner, particularly his late unfinished works, are viewed and understood by the public, this paper seeks to explore how and why Turner has been claimed as a precursor to the modernist movement. In doing so it sheds light on not only a moment when academic and public discourses on the art of Turner intersected but also highlights the repercussions of these narratives in contemporary museum displays at Tate and worldwide.
Richard Johns, University of York
Turner’s Least Event
The Turner Bequest is an anomalous survival. Comprising around 300 works on canvas and something like 30,000 catalogued works on paper, it has been the determining force in understandings of Turner after Turner, reimagined by successive generations of curators, art historians and artists. This paper turns attention towards an overlooked but compelling aspect of the Bequest – the blank and near-blank pages that account for around 5,000 items (or one sixth of all the catalogued works by Turner at Tate). Though largely without discernible content, Turner’s blanks bear the manual and digital trace of consecutive efforts to take a measure of the artist’s creative life. Beginning with John Ruskin’s early annotations, they have been meticulously conserved, individually marked, recorded and (more recently) photographed to modern museum standards and reproduced online. Conceptually and materially, Turner’s blanks exist at the edge of the Bequest – at the threshold between ‘Turner’ and ‘not-Turner’ – where the generative power of the artist’s creative legacy becomes visible in unexpected ways. As such, they hold a special place in the enduring mythology of Turner, as the archival trace of what the artist didn’t do, or of what he might have done. In an attempt to give Turner’s empty spaces, the attention they so insistently demand, I turn for help to more recent artists whose work tends towards the blank – among them, John Latham, whose esoteric, time-based art (and unruly archive) foreground the concept of the ‘least event’, where ‘nothing’ becomes ‘not-nothing’.
Amy Concannon, Tate Britain
Response