Lifting the Veil: J.M.W. Turner and John Ruskin

If the spirit of Joseph Mallord William Turner is looking down on New York these days — possibly from somewhere in the vicinity of the sun, which in his dying days he declared to be God — he must have very mixed feelings. He would be satisfied to see that the show of the season is the Metropolitan Museum’s giant exhibition of his work — satisfied, but not surprised.During his immensely productive lifetime (1775-1851), Turner was confident that he would be remembered as one of the greatest painters who ever lived: “I am the real lion. I am the great lion of the day,” he was known to boast when in his cups. The artist who left his work to the English people, but only “provided that a room or rooms are added to the present National Gallery to be called when erected ‘Turner’s Gallery,'” would find the Met’s 140-picture show no more than his due.What would not please Turner is the surprisingly unfriendly reaction of the New York press to the show. It has been strange, over the last month, to see our most prominent critics treat Turner with such pronounced resistance. The Met’s show is “astonishing for all the wrong reasons,” and “landed with a thud,” the Bloomberg News reviewer wrote. The Times’ critic complained that Turner’s “innovations can be dulled by … repetitiveness,” and that in any case “innovation, influence and precedence don’t necessarily make a work compelling when you’re standing before it.” The New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl went so far as to compare Turner’s “stunts” and “irritable ambition” with those of the contemporary British artist-huckster Damien Hirst.Yet in the end, Turner would probably dismiss all these objections with a surly wave of the hand. He certainly had experience with uncomprehending audiences: A large part of his legend has to do with the misbegotten reactions of his contemporaries. When he first exhibited his “Fall of the Rhine at Schaffhausen,” a newspaper editor was heard to murmur, “He is a madman.” The intense yellow background of “Jessica,” inspired by a character in “The Merchant of Venice,” led William Wordsworth to observe, “it looks to me as if the painter had indulged in raw liver until he was very unwell.” If Turner, a notoriously proud and unfriendly man, could weather such barbs, he could certainly ignore the politer reservations of our own critics.No, the spirit that would be in agony, if he could see how the Turner show was received, is that of John Ruskin, the great Victorian writer whose name is forever linked with his favorite artist’s. To say that Ruskin is Turner’s foremost admirer is an understatement: Never in the history of art has a writer achieved such a close symbiosis with a painter. In 1843, at the age of 24, Ruskin made his name with the first volume of “Modern Painters,” which was essentially a long sermon on Turner’s greatness. Throughout his life, as his interests expanded from painting to architecture to social reform, Ruskin wrote expertly about Turner’s work, using it to educate the eyes and spirits of his countrymen. He collected Turners — thanks to the generosity of his father, a wealthy wine-merchant — and when the painter died, in 1851, Ruskin was named one of his executors, tasked with cataloging his many thousands of drawings.To understand why Turner is no longer in fashion, then, it is helpful to read Ruskin, who wrote at a time when Turner was not yet in fashion. In fact, Ruskin’s first public writing about the painter was a letter to the editor of Blackwood’s Magazine, protesting a hostile review of Turner’s picture “Juliet and Her Nurse.” The critic had described it as a lot of Venetian scenes “thrown higgledy-piggledy together, streaked blue and pink, and thrown into a flour tub.” But the 17-year-old Ruskin, who had already come to love Turner’s engravings of Italian landscapes, defended the painter’s freedom from pictorial convention. Turner’s “imagination is Shakespearean in its mightiness,” Ruskin wrote: He was not so much illustrating “Romeo and Juliet” as translating it freely into the terms of his own art.Such translation between genres would be the basis of Ruskin’s own lifelong obsession with Turner. For Ruskin, it was great writers, not other painters, who set the terms of Turner’s achievement. Throughout “Modern Painters,” he used quotations from Wordsworth to capture the effect of Turner’s Romantic sublimity. “Turner’s sense of beauty,” Ruskin argued, “was perfect … only that of Keats and Tennyson being comparable with it. And Turner’s love of truth was as stern and patient as Dante’s.” Elsewhere, Ruskin said that Turner’s only peers were Shakespeare and Francis Bacon (also known as Baron Verulam), and that the painter was the most original of the trinity. “By Shakespeare, humanity was unsealed to you; by Verulam the principles of nature, and by Turner, her aspect … But of all the three, though not the greatest, Turner was the most unprecedented in his work. Bacon did what Aristotle had attempted; Shakespeare did perfectly what Aeschylus did partially; but none before Turner had lifted the veil from the face of nature.”By “lifting the veil,” Ruskin meant to convey the double nature of Turner’s achievement. On the one hand, Ruskin argued in great detail that Turner had portrayed nature more accurately, with more freedom from mere pictorial convention, than any other painter. In one bravura passage, Ruskin catalogs Turner’s pictures according to the time of day and the position of the sun when they were painted, based purely on internal evidence. So precise is Turner’s depiction of light that Ruskin claims to be able to distinguish between “Alps at Daybreak,” where the sun is “a quarter of an hour risen,” from “Beaugency,” where it is “half an hour risen.”Yet at the same time, the lifting of the veil also means something more mystical. For if Turner’s sunlight is as precise as an almanac, it is also as symbolic as a poem, as Ruskin proves by going on to compose his own prose-poem in its honor:There is the motion, the actual wave and radiation of the darted beam: not the dull universal daylight, which falls on the landscape without life, or direction, or speculation, equal on all things and dead on all things; but the breathing, animated, exulting light, which feels, and receives, and rejoices, and acts — which chooses one thing, and rejects another — which seeks, and finds, and loses again — leaping from rock to rock, from leaf to leaf, from wave to wave — glowing, or flashing, or scintillating, according to what it strikes; or, in its holier moods, absorbing and enfolding all things in the deep fulness of its repose, and then again losing itself in bewilderment, and doubt, and dimness … It is the living light, which breathes in its deepest, most entranced rest, which sleeps, but never dies.This is not just the light of the sun but “the light of the world,” a secular version of Christian redemption. And Ruskin’s prose, in its rich, hypnotic cadences, its straining after a music that seems beyond words, is another attempt to capture that same light. Turner and Ruskin, in this vision, are both Romantic poets, striving after an infinity that art can barely contain. Indeed, Ruskin argued that no painter before Turner, even the greatest, had come close to reflecting that infinity: “We shall find, the more we examine the old masters, that always, and in all parts, they are totally wanting in every feeling of infinity.”It is only if we can recognize what it means to long, like Ruskin, for the infinite that we can fully sympathize with Turner’s skyscapes and seascapes, or with the lashings of light and darkness that turn even his historical pictures into natural mysteries. This is a kind of reverence that no longer comes as easily in the 21st century as it did in the 19th, as can be seen when a reviewer complains that “there is something imperious and impersonal about the sheer force of Turner’s ambition.” In life, Turner was indeed an ambitious man. But the ambition in his paintings is not personal, the way that Damien Hirst’s is; Turner did not simply leverage shock for fame. His is a spiritual ambition, a longing for transcendence so powerful that it could ignite a scarcely less magnificent longing in his pupil Ruskin. As the critic wrote, “if you … have no feeling for the glorious passages of mingled earth and heaven which Turner calls up before you into breathing tangible being, there is indeed no hope for your apathy, art will never touch you, nor nature inform.”akirsch@nysun.com

Lifting the Veil: J.M.W. Turner and John Ruskin

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