Turner: Imagination and Reality

"Gowing was a painter who also wrote, but I think his best work is his writing. He was very encouraging to me when I was starting out, while he was reaching the end of his career and, indeed, the end of his life. This catalogue was published on the occasion of the first ever exhibition of a long-dead painter at the Museum of Modern Art. It’s only about thirty pages, but it is utterly brilliant. What was revolutionary about it was the way in which Gowing recognised what Turner had given to modern painting, which had been inherited in America primarily via Claude Monet who, in my opinion, although immensely gifted, is essentially a follower of Turner. The water lily paintings are huge versions and therefore even more radical in their appearance and experience than perhaps Turner’s watercolours, but they are huge versions of Turner’s own pictures. It was through their agency that New York art acquired a lot of its vocabulary for painting. With someone like Rothko or Jackson Pollock, it is very hard to imagine how they could have painted without the earlier model of someone such as Monet, and therefore, without the tradition actually initiated by Turner. But while one can say Gowing’s book is revolutionary, I think its message has still not been properly absorbed or understood. “Claude Monet, in my opinion, although immensely gifted, is essentially a follower of Turner.” The sixties were a time when art historians including Robert Rosenblum (whose work I could have chosen) were themselves trying to understand the origin of modern painting. I think Lawrence knew all about that. He put on this exhibition to give to the New York audience—but, above all, to the New York painters of the time, although it was a little bit later than their heyday—the concrete evidence of what Turner had done. It included lots of things that had previously been considered unfinished and which still are listed and exhibited by the Tate as not necessarily being finished works. Many are barely ever exhibited. There’s a place in the book where Lawrence asks: Would Turner have left nineteen thousand works of art to the nation—when ninety-nine percent of them are ‘unfinished’—if he hadn’t thought them worthy of attention? The essence of his argument as I recall it is this. Painters before Turner treated light in different revolutionary ways. For example, Caravaggio had painted light and shade—chiaroscuro—in a way that no one previously had quite done, and created this almost cinematic form of lighting for art that gave an immense quality of drama that then captured the attention of painters such as Rembrandt and all of Spanish art. Vermeer took the perception of light that you get when you look into a camera obscura. In a sense, he understood what photographs teach us about light before photography was even invented: they show us that there is no such thing as a line in art; that everything is a tone. No matter how finely defined the line, in reality, it’s still only ever made of different particles of light and shade for the eye. No one before Turner had the thought of reversing the fundamental epistemology of vision that is implicit in all previous representational art. This is, namely, the notion that objects are the things that are real in the world and in our experience, and light is that which makes us able to apprehend objects. Light helps us to see what is true, what is real, what is lasting, what is fixed—and however you paint it, that’s the deal. Turner, as Lawrence argues so compellingly, realises at some point around 1828 that it might be the other way around. In other words, it might be that things are not real and the only thing that is real is light. What is eternal and enduring and bouncing, refracting, moving, and curving around is energy that is light, and everything else is completely coincidental and of no real significance. That’s why Turner likes painting places like Venice. Venice is a city, but it’s a city falling down—what you see is the light. In everything that Turner does through a certain period, that is the essential proposition. And no one saw this in the nineteenth century, no one really saw it in the twentieth century, and no one properly, perhaps, even sees it now. I don’t know how many people read Lawrence Gowing on Turner and I don’t know how many people even think about Turner. But that’s his argument. The argument I would build is that Turner doesn’t just predict in painting the art of the Abstract Expressionists, but lays the intellectual groundwork for the work of Einstein and post-Euclidean physics. No one really understood it whatsoever. The only person who understood what on earth Turner was doing was Monet, and then he passed it on to the Impressionists. There’s a famous letter written by Monet and the other Impressionists after Turner’s death that said: A group of French painters united by the same aesthetic tendencies . . . applying themselves with passion to the rendering of the reality of forms in movement, as well as to the fugitive phenomena of light, cannot forget that it has been preceded in this path by a great master of the English school, the illustrious Turner. Monet spent the rest of his life pretending that he had never written that letter because he didn’t want people to know how indebted he was. But the great shimmering schemes of light that are Monet’s late water lily paintings are clearly built, absolutely and entirely, from the materials furnished to him by Turner. It’s very significant that Monet visited London in 1872 during the Paris Commune and came to see Turner’s work in the National Gallery. As part of his bequest, Turner insisted that two of his great seaport paintings be exhibited right next to two of Claude’s seaport paintings—Claude being a seventeenth century French painter who Turner greatly admired. It’s very interesting that when Monet paints the very first Impressionist picture— Impression, Sunris e —it’s a seaport painting. It is a Turner seaport but in a modern setting. It hasn’t got the classical trimmings; it doesn’t look like a Claude any more, but it bears the mark of that exposure of the origin of Monet’s idea to Turner. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . But English people didn’t have a clue what Turner was doing. They thought painting was about representing a horse or a dog, or that it was some way of communicating what you thought about a passage in Homer. The idea that a painting could be a radical force for changing the way that you see and think about reality—that painting could be that deeply philosophical—was utterly alien to the British who, in any case, hated anything resembling metaphysical philosophy in the first place. The idea that a painter could be philosophical was totally out of their framework of thinking. It was even out of the framework of the thinking of someone like Ruskin. He didn’t understand that aspect of Turner at all. Ruskin thought Turner was great because of his colours. No, not at all. He was highly inarticulate. Other than perhaps “the sun is God” which we’re not sure he even said. He might have said “I’ll have some cod”, or something like that, but it’s gone down as “the sun is God”. It was garbled out of the side of his mouth when he was nearly dead, so no one really knows what he said. But Lawrence puts this book together really beautifully. It’s the best thing ever written that I’ve ever read about art. Apart—of course—from my own work. [ Laughs ]. It’s absolutely fantastic. It is exemplary."