‘Turner’ Harnesses the Fury of Nature at Its Fullest Force

J.M.W. Turner has never before been the subject of a major exhibition in this country. The omission seems odd.

Turner’s first seascape painting for London’s Royal Academy was made about eight years after Capt. Arthur Phillip completed one of the great sea voyages in English history. Against huge odds Phillip had transported several hundred English convicts and their families across 15,000 miles of ocean, landing first at Botany Bay and then at Sydney Harbor. The crucible from which modern Australia emerged is the same one that gave us the spectacle of Turner’s art.

A colonial outpost whose era of settlement by English seafarers roughly coincided with the mature years of the British artist’s often astonishing paintings of the sea would seem a peculiarly resonant locale for an examination of Turner’s art.

And so it turns out to be. A compelling new exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia shows, among other things, how the great British painter mythologized the sea. In oils and watercolors made during the first half of the 19th century, Turner conflated images of the untamed magnificence and excitement of nature with a cultural mastery over a wildly adventurous attitude toward painting.

A small exhibition of the artist’s oil paintings was mounted in Australia more than 30 years ago, while a more sizable show of his dynamic watercolors appeared in the 1980s. But the 33 paintings and 64 watercolors that make up the current show comprise the first comprehensive look at his work ever assembled in Australia. Jointly organized with the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, where the full-scale overview of these often ecstatically sensuous pictures will make its only other stop at the end of June, “Turner” is rich in provocative insight.

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) was among the greatest of the European Romantic landscape painters. The show is missing a few of his classic works, such as “The Slave Ship” (1840) and “Rain, Steam and Speed--The Great Western Railway” (1844). But it does include many of the most important pictures the artist made.

Not the least of them are the famously dramatic pair of 1835 views of London’s Parliament ablaze. The paintings, borrowed from museums in Cleveland and Philadelphia, have been seen together only twice before. They show a devastating fire the previous October, caused by careless burning of tax records.

The burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons had been a momentous spectacle, both viscerally and for the British imagination. The inferno roared for hours, the fire’s towering flames brilliantly reflected in the river.

When it was over most of the medieval structures were gone. For a nation in the destabilizing throes of a world-altering Industrial Revolution, such a conflagration in its ancient, established seat of government marked something of a psychic turning point.

Turner, along with what seemed like most of London, had raced down to the Thames to watch the cataclysmic news event. Like CNN with a paintbrush, he apparently recorded the scene in sketches as it happened. (Some dispute this, saying they were done from memory shortly after.) The sketches became the source for his two paintings.

One self-evident theme in these alarming pictures is utter human helplessness in the face of spectacular natural forces--a theme central to the Romantic imagination in an era of vast industrial expansion. (The current movie “Twister” is a formulaic descendant of this old Romantic ethos.) Nature functions as part dire warning, part great escape, part metaphor for social cataclysm.

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However, nature wasn’t all that Turner seems to have regarded as sublime. Painting, too, assumed a stature of awesome exaltation in his work.

Blazing sunsets at sea, mountainous thunderclouds, mysterious mists gathering over the canals of Venice, listing ships beneath moonlit waves, a glowing sunrise shrouding an apparition of sea monsters--these subjects were painted with a knowing admiration for the established styles and familiar compositions of a variety of artistic precedents. Everyone from Claude Lorrain and Rembrandt to various Dutch marine painters and English local heroes are swept up into Turner’s brush.

So is a commitment to up-to-the-minute artistic fashion. Today, fashionability is often mindlessly hurled as a critical epithet for art, but Turner wanted his pictures to be part and parcel of the new public tumult of modern life. (Not by accident did he rush his paintings of the Parliament blaze into public exhibitions, the first less than four months after the fire.) He kept abreast of what his fellow artists were doing and regularly tried to one-up them.

Likewise he embraced a forward-looking experimentalism. Almost as fast as new painting pigments were invented they appeared on his palette--most notably the chromium yellow that led some derisive critics to describe his work as “jaundiced.”

Turner always intended his pictures to be representational, but he pushed the technical limits as far as he could. One of the most remarkable works in the Canberra show is a small piece of millboard gently brushed with a halation of yellow, ochre, white and brown paints. To 20th century eyes it looks astonishingly abstract; but in the context of Turner’s art, it’s more likely a study representing atmospheric effects in colored light.

All of which is to say that Turner’s seductive, theatrical, painterly technique is as much a subject of his work as is the drama of nature. As the show’s excellent catalog avers, this is an artist whose visually dynamic record of a volatile period in history means to knit together the past, present and future. Turner’s art created an image of heroic continuity. When you look at his paintings you witness the drama of culture, too.

The distance Turner traveled in his work can be plainly charted between two pictures, one early, the other late. “Fishermen at Sea” (1796)--that first work for the Royal Academy, accepted when he was 21--crisply depicts a small boat tossed on emerald waves beneath a dark, moonlit sky; meanwhile, the incredibly titled “Snowstorm--Steam Boat Off a Harbor’s Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water, and Going by the Lead. The Author Was in This Storm on the Night the Ariel Left Harwich,” painted almost 50 years later, is a thundering vortex of dark and light pigments swirling around a near-apparition of a ghostly ship--a visual maelstrom through which your eye is rambunctiously tossed.

The first picture describes a haunting drama of the sea, but the second one strives to make you feel it, imaginatively. Almost no one believes anymore Turner’s claim that he painted “Snowstorm” after having been lashed to an actual ship’s mast during a wintry tempest. Seeing the amazing picture, though, you know why he successfully made the boast.

* National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, through June 10. Open daily.