Art review: Turner and the Masters

Published on Monday 5 October 2009 19:08

TURNER AND THE MASTERS *** TATE BRITAIN, LONDON

WE ARE taught that we should value originality above all else, but in fact art is a collective enterprise. All the great artists of the past have been intensely curious about and willing to learn, from not only the art of their friends, contemporaries and rivals, but also of their predecessors – the art of the Renaissance was built on the emulation of antiquity. Artists have always marched forward in a great phalanx: living artists at the head, but the great army of the past travelling with them and supporting them. This doesn't stifle originality. Far from it, it provides the confidence that comes from having a true measure of one's own achievement.

Paradoxically, in this age of access to everything, the weakness of contemporary art is that this has broken down, The once-great artists' collective has been sadly diminished and is much impoverished. The artists we hear most about are just a little group isolated from history by the decaying myth of modern difference, the discredited idea that somehow the modern world, and so modern art, are not like the rest of history. They seem to know little and care less about the art of anyone other than their contemporaries and a small band of ill-chosen heroes, who are pygmies beside the artistic giants of the past.

The exhibition Turner and the Masters at Tate Britain sets out to demonstrate how things should be: the artist as a conscious member of the greater historic community. Turner was of course himself a master and he was undoubtedly one of the most original British artists, but as this exhibition demonstrates, throughout his long career he was never too proud to learn from others, whether they were the great artists of the past or his contemporaries – or indeed, by imitation to match himself directly against them.

When he did this, it was often in quite transparent rivalry. Turner's paintings of Venice are among the most glorious things that he did, for instance. The exhibition rightly proposes Canaletto as his first model. Indeed, his Bridge of Sighs: Canaletti Painting is a direct tribute to the Venetian, but this exhibition also suggests that the initial stimulus for these pictures came from the success with Venetian scenes of a contemporary, Clarkson Stanfield. There was no contest, contemporaries agreed. The shimmering light of Turner's Venice from the Porch of Madonna della Salute, for instance, leaves both Canaletto and Stanfield plodding far behind.

It did not work every time, however. Turner was often brave enough to try something out of curiosity or rivalry, but fail. When David Wilkie burst on the London scene with his Village Politicians in 1806, for instance, Turner took note and the next year, alongside Wilkie's Blind Fiddler, he exhibited his own essays in the genre, Blacksmith Disputing Upon the Price of Iron and The Unpaid Bill. His challenge was a failure, however. They are uninspiring pictures and no match for Wilkie. For all his enormous talent, Turner simply didn't have Wilkie's gift for the acute observation of human behaviour. It was a dialogue, however. The Unpaid Bill represents a dentist's surgery in a Hogarthian muddle, but it has sunshine streaming through a window. This is Turner improving on Rembrandt and Wilkie copied it in his Pedlar a year or two later.

There was an Old Master in the picture here too. Wilkie's overt debt was to David Teniers and so Turner also paid homage to Teniers even while taking on Wilkie. In that same year, 1807, he exhibited one of his loveliest pictures, Sun Rising Through Vapour: Fishermen Cleaning and Selling Fish. Just off-centre, the sun is rising above the sea. Shining gold through soft grey mist, it makes a luminous track across the water and touches the little ripples on the muddy foreshore. Distant ships are grey ghosts in the dawn light, but in the foreground, boats and a group of fishermen and women selling fish are more solid, illuminated by the light reflected from high clouds already catching the sun. It is a tour de force and in it we see Turner, not just trying to outsmart Wilkie, but in both the figures and the colouring learning from him and also picking up on his insight into the art of Teniers. Claude too is part of this picture, but above all it is a great Turner and far more than the sum of such parts.

The whole structure of the exhibition is based on pairings. Instead of being shown with Wilkie, Teniers, or indeed Claude, Sun Rising through Vapour… is paired with an unexciting painting by the Dutch sea painter Jan van de Capelle. This approach makes a good art historical thesis, but as the theme of an exhibition it does Turner no favours. It reduces his mercurial imagination and his extraordinary powers of assimilation to a kind of binary system. Modern art historians don't have too much time for the qualitative distinctions that make art interesting either. Turner imitated Rembrandt, Titian, Poussin and a good many others – often disastrously. His Venus and Adonis in the manner of Titian is pretty bad and his Jessica in the manner of Rembrandt is a real stinker, as is Pilate Washing His Hands. Nor did he always fare well against his contemporaries. His enormous The Battle of Trafalgar, a companion to a work by de Loutherbourg, was badly received for its historical detail – it seems to represent the battle as a British disaster – but doesn't win any points for painting either. Indeed, you come away asking who would have thought that Turner painted so many bad pictures?

Nevertheless there are some wonderful pictures here. Turner was on safer ground dealing with the great landscape painters, above all with Claude and the Dutch. Early on, he was commissioned to paint a companion piece to a painting by Willem van der Velde. The Dutch picture is superb: Two boats sail into a stiff wind and against the rising sea; the sun catches a sail against a darkening sky. Boldly, Turner has repeated the composition in reverse. He paints the heeling boats on rising waves, the sun catching the sails and the dark storm clouds beyond, but compared to the Dutch painting his picture is full of movement and drama. It is as monumental as its companion, but filled with the fleeting transience of the sea's restless movement, of the light and of the weather. He painted several beautiful pictures in homage to Jacob Ruisdael and Cuyp too. Here the comparisons are illuminating and it is also a real treat to see great Dutch pictures like Ruisdael's magnificent Rough Sea, for instance.

But the painter to whom Turner paid lifelong homage was Claude. Here too some of the individual pairings are odd, but there are some wonderful Claudes and some wonderful Turners too and you can make your own connections. Claude in his seaports painted straight into the sun. Turner followed his example in some of his own most memorable pictures. In Abingdon, for instance, and in Mercury Sent to Admonish Aeneas, one of the last pictures he ever exhibited, the central light has taken over the painting and floods everything. Sun Rising Through Vapour… is also a homage to Claude in this particular effect. Turner really wanted us to make the comparison: in his will he requested that this picture and his Dido Building Carthage should be hung alongside two of the National Gallery's great Claudes. It was cheeky, but that is how the pictures are now hung. Turner was anxious about his place in history, we are told. Well, he didn't need to worry. His name was established long ago. The art historians got to him too late to do any real damage.