February 2012

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‘Turner and the Masters’ at Tate Britain (23 September-31 January 2010) achieves what the organisation’s outgoing director, Stephen Deuchar, describes as the ‘logical conclusion’ to presenting a Turner retrospective. The exhibition is, as Deuchar explains, ‘a simple idea’ documenting the career of Turner. It shows what made him the master he is considered today through an exploration of his artistic personality.

This retrospective, however, doesn’t simply provide a visual chronology of Turner’s work but offers a comparison with Turner’s own artistic influences, including artists such as Rembrandt, Poussin and Titian. In exhibiting the works alongside each other, the Tate offers us a portrayal of Turner as the ‘cockney-speaking barber’s son’ who breezed his way through the international echelons of high art. Even from Turner’s student days, during which the artist emulated and adapted the work of past masters, like his Dutch Boats in a Gale (above; painted at just 25 to hang alongside a de Velde), it is clear that Turner was emerging as an audacious artist. He was determined to modernise, using light and stunningly brilliant colours.

There is a particularly amusing anecdote involving Constable, a gun and some red paint. Days before the fateful Royal Academy show of 1832, known as ‘varnishing days’, the laborious Constable was desperately adding more paint to his work that had been some 15 years in production. Alongside him, Turner nonchalantly flicked his brush, crafting a red buoy in an otherwise monochromatic seascape. ‘Turner’s just been in and fired a gun’, Constable was heard to have said afterwards.

The comparative element of the exhibition allows us to see the artistic decisions made by Turner and to deliberate over Turner’s very particular interpretations of other artists’ masterpieces. It is up to us to decide whether this is unabashed arrogance or reverent emulation – many artists at the time certainly weren’t happy exhibiting next to the artist. Turner deliberately created works to be hung alongside these others: he requested a selection of his works be hung in the National Gallery next to a selection by Claude Lorrain – one of his greatest influences. It was a request that curator David Solkin compares to ‘being buried with your wife’.

The Tate has succeeded in compiling a selection of masterpieces from as far away as Washington and Tokyo, reunited for the first time in over 170 years after a great deal of curatorial string-pulling. In fact, Turner and de Velde have not been shown together since 1837. Another Turner on show has been hidden from public view since 1968. The joy of this exhibition is that it enables us to view the works as they would have been seen by then contemporary audiences: that first 1832 encounter between Turner and Constable, mentioned above, has finally been re-created for today’s viewers. Turner’s painterly audacity is demonstrated as if for the first time, especially considering that this reunion has been several lifetimes in the making.

Every room of this expansive exhibition, covering six galleries, provides at least one captivating scene that reminds us of Turner’s genius. We are regularly left in awe of this British master who played a game of one-upmanship with internationally renowned artists in pursuit of his own recognition. Tate succeeds in showing Turner as an artist who was unafraid to challenge boundaries and to reinvent ideas throughout his career – often causing quite a storm in the process.

‘Turner and the Masters’ is at Tate Britain, London, from 23 September until 31 January 2010.

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