The eccentric genius of J.M.W. Turner

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on June 28, 2008 at 10:00 PM, updated June 29, 2008 at 9:33 AM
Joseph Mallord William Turner's 1805 oil painting "The Shipwreck" is one of 140 oils, watercolors and prints on display at The Metropolitan Museum of Art Tuesday through Sept. 21.

J.M.W. Turner. Where: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 5th Avenue at 82nd Street, New York. When: Tuesday-Sept. 21. 9:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Sundays and Tuesdays-Thursdays, 9:30 a.m.-9 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays. Beverage and sandwich service until closing. How much: Suggested donation $20; $10 students and seniors; children under 12 free. Call (212) 535-7710 or visit

"A Typhoon bursting in a simoon over the Whirlpool of the Maelstrom, Norway, with a Ship on fire, an Eclipse, and the Effect of a Lunar Rainbow," is the way the satirical English magazine Punch once described a painting by Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851).

If you think blank consternation over the indecipherable smears the rich were paying good money to look at was restricted to the dawn of total abstraction after the 1940s, just listen to how folks once described the work of "J.M.W. Turner," whose first American retrospective in more than 40 years will open to the public Tuesday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In 1841, for example, a popular stage pantomime in London had a boy carrying a tray of jam tarts fall through the skylight of a gallery where Turner was showing. The dealer dusted down the broken tarts, put a frame around them, and offered to sell them for a thousand pounds.

Cue the laughing trombones. Actually, Turner was not the man (as critic John Ruskin said) to fling a "pot of paint in the public's face," as even a cursory glance through these 140 oils, watercolors and prints will tell you. For all the talk about how England's greatest painter, the working class bad boy genius of his day, is a precursor of the Impressionists, he was at heart a man of his age and a Romantic.

But he did like a little mystery, making the viewer work to see his theme, which is often reduced to a miniature somewhere you don't automatically think to look. Even when you do find it, it can still be elusive, largely because the themes themselves can be fugitive.

For example, Turner once called one of his storm-tossed canvases "Bocaccio Telling the Story of the Bird-cage," and you can, after a small effort, find a seated old man speaking to rapt listeners under the lowering sky -- except in all of the Renaissance Italian's writings there is no mention of a bird-cage anywhere.

Good title, though.

There is more than enough Turner in this show, drawn largely from the Turner Bequest at the Tate Gallery in London and outfitted with choice examples from American collections, to convince you of his startling and original talents, even enough, we think, to justify the huge prices he could command for them.

The masterpiece the 20th century Modernists loved -- "The Fighting Temeraire," with its Industrial Age theme of obsolescence (it shows an old sailing ship being towed by a black paddle steamer to dry-dock for breaking up) -- did not make this trip, but plenty of other Turner faves did. "Hannibal Crossing the Alps" is here, as is "Ulysses Deriding Polyphemous," "Keelmen Heaving Coals by Moonlight," several of his Venice paintings, the series of delightful watercolors preparatory to his "Burning of the Houses of Parliament," and probably the best stand-in for the "Temeraire," the truly awesome "Peace -- Burial at Sea."

And while in reproduction these paintings may often seem to foretell Impressionism or even, especially among the late works, Abstract Expressionism, seeing them all together here tells a different story. Turner was indeed a Romantic painter, tied all his life to the Thames or the sea. He did his rocky Alpine crags, but it was water, light and fire he loved, and the way these things rhymed with his own era of Industrial Revolution. Indeed, the way the omnipresent atmospheric pollution of unrestrained capitalist development colored the sunsets and rises of his day lends his work a poetry he himself probably never imagined.

Turner was lucky that way, born at the right time and pushing beyond it, all at once. But he isn't an Impressionist, nor is he a budding De Kooning; there are no brushstrokes here at all. Turner does not thrust the way he makes his marks at you. The way these images were made remains, at least to the superficial eye, entirely mysterious -- again, the way Turner liked it.

Contemporaries tell stories about his eccentricities, like the one about his taking a still-wet picture to the Royal Academy, seeing it in new light, and right then and there taking out his snuffbox and smearing powdered tobacco on the canvas (for all the world like Jackson Pollock smashing burning cigarettes into his house paint). Once a patron complained to Turner that a nude had literally peeled off the canvas, and when Turner came round to see he immediately laughed and ripped the figure off entirely. "Why, this is only paper!" the artist said. He had been sketching models at the academy, and seeing that one of his drawings was about the right scale, he had stuck it into the paint and left it there. "Meant to paint it in, Oy did, but Oy forgot. Do it now, Oy will," he said, and restored the puckered canvas.

He was short and stocky, with a beaked nose, so that in person he looked rather like a parrot wearing a cravat, tails, and a top hat. And, again true to his age, Turner was entirely a self-made man, a Cockney genius whose accent often seemed impenetrable to his better-bred peers. Turner's father had a barber shop in Maiden Lane, where he cut the hair of the up-and-coming industrialists and lawyers, and he started showing his son's work in the shop when the boy was barely a teen. The son was almost immediately a success.

So, self-taught and self-directed, Turner became an almost Dickensian character, smudging his way through society and life. "Me dad never praised me except for the saving of a shilling," Turner would say, and he became famous for pinching pennies, charging patrons for the cost of their frames (something the better sort of painter threw in as a salute to the carriage trade) and even demanding taxi fare home when he delivered a canvas. He would write down the dates and serial numbers of every banknote he was paid with, and while he kept hordes of cats in his various London homes, they were all tail-less, on the theory that tail-less cats saved money by dragging less of the cold air in with them when they came in from outside.

He never married, though he had two daughters by a distant relation and acknowledged them in his will. At the end of his life he became attached to a wealthy widow, a Mrs. Booth, who owned a rooming house by the sea. She cared for him to the very end, though she noted later that he had never contributed a farthing to their mutual up-keep in all the time she knew him. When he died, the neighborhood was amazed to learn that "Admiral Booth," as the locals knew him, was in fact the famous J.M.W. Turner.

A little mystery goes a long way.

Dan Bischoff may be reached at