J.M.W. Turner
Dallas Museum of Art, February 10-May 18, 2008
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, July 1-September 21, 2008

"So I am to become a nonentity, am I?" These words, attributed to the 76-year-old Joseph Mallord William Turner on his deathbed, offer a revelatory insight into the boiling ambition that fueled his long and controversial career. For over six decades, this lowborn painter worked furiously to establish and sustain his reputation as the greatest painter in Britain. As one walks through the 12 rooms of this stupendous exhibit, currently at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the largest ever in North America, one recognizes an artist whose imaginative vision and innovative techniques of light and color expanded artistic possibilities in the 19th century. Turner also had a remarkable "second life" in the mid-20th century when his late unfinished works were rediscovered in the heyday of the Abstract Expressionists, as well as by a host of experimental filmmakers.

J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) was an unlikely candidate for the title of the greatest British painter of his age. His father was a barber and wigmaker who showed his precocious son's drawings in the window of his shop in Covent Garden. Soon after enrolling as a student at the Royal Academy in 1790, Turner recognized that garnering attention at the Academy's annual exhibition was a necessity if he was to rise from the ranks. From then on his ambition was inextricably bound up with the Academy's professed aim of developing a uniquely British school of painting. By 1802, at the age of 26, he was elected a full Royal Academician--the youngest member ever so admitted.

Five years after this honor, Turner sought out another: He became professor of perspective, in which capacity he delivered a course of lectures in most years during 1811-1828. The uneducated but intellectually curious Turner took pains to present his innovative ideas visually in diagrams. He retained a lifelong devotion to the Royal Academy, describing it at one point as the "institution to which I owe everything."

Although Turner first attained distinction with his precise architectural watercolors depicting the melancholy ruins of grand Gothic abbeys in all their "picturesque" variety, he knew that he must master the more traditional art of oil painting if he was to be taken seriously. This meant accepting the Academy's hierarchy of genres. History painting, with its resonant stories based on the Bible or such ancient writers as Homer and Virgil, was considered the most demanding art form both for the skills required and for the elevated moral teachings offered.

As we can see in the early rooms of the exhibit, Turner was amazingly quick to assimilate the lessons of the old masters Claude Lorraine and the Dutch marine painters, and to learn from (and outshine) his contemporaries such as John Constable. Nevertheless, he bristled at the Academy's denigration of landscape as a "mere" reproduction of appearances. His strategy was to imbue his canvases with heroic literary references and atmospheric effects that created their own sense of drama.