The Magazine

Turner in Perspective

The British master who straddled old and new.

Jan 14, 2008, Vol. 13, No. 17 • By JOSEPH PHELAN
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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.

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