Landscapist of Light

Op-art banners fluttered from the flagpoles in the darkness overhead, and through the doors of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art surged the opening-night black-tie throng. To celebrate the first evening of spring, girls wore their gayest dresses -- flaring Pucci pajamas, metal-petaled above-the-knee A-lines, the newest see-through evening gowns. The occasion for all this festivity? The Modern's salute to a painter who has been dead 114 years, Joseph M. W. Turner, the 19th century romantic saint who so believed in communion with nature that at the age of 66 he had himself lashed to the mast of a ship while crossing the English Channel so that he might the better observe the awesome spectacle of a blizzard at sea.

"It will be a stunning irony," remarked one critic, "if the most popular, consequential, stirring exhibition ever presented by the Modern Museum should turn out to be that of an old master." If Old Master Turner himself could have been present, he would probably have found it doubly ironic, and staggering as well. For up on the wall were 99 oils and watercolors that included, besides some of Turner's most famous oils, those other paintings that during his lifetime he had kept carefully hidden away in his studio along with his intimate sketchbooks and his notes on technical research. And it is Turner's lesser-known works, selected by the Tate Gallery's Keeper of British Painting Lawrence Gowing and the Modern's Monroe Wheeler, that strike contemporary sensibilities with such stunning effect.

Soapsuds & Whitewash. Turner, who in his own lifetime was recognized as perhaps the greatest painter of his era, knew his full share of both wealth and derision. Born to a Covent Garden barber in 1775, he was admitted at 14 as a student in the Royal Academy. At 27, he was elected a full-fledged academician. The works that won him fame, however, were hardly revolutionary. During his earlier years, Turner churned out Old Testament fantasies, nymphs cavorting in arcadian glades, and historical scenarios of such newsworthy topics as the battles of Waterloo and Trafalgar.

But the paintings that make Turner look as if he were born only the day before yesterday are those in which, with shimmering veils of color, he fused imagination and reality. A contemporary of Turner dubbed one such work "soapsuds and whitewash." Essayist William Hazlitt called them "pictures of nothing and very like." Yet they anticipated impressionism and even abstract expressionism.

Decayed Likeness. Turner's romanticism was directed more at his art than his private life. A reclusive bachelor till his death in 1851, he was more a stodgy old crumpet than the philanderer who, several biographers have hinted, fathered five illegitimate children. Though fame attracted him, he dodged the patrician world of fox hunts and fancy clubs, ended up living in a dilapidated London town house, cluttered with what he called his "darlings"--his paintings--or in a little Thames-side refuge where he was thought by neighbors to be a certain Admiral Booth, husband of the landlady.

The Turners that pleased the public during the artist's 76 years built him a fortune of nearly $700,000. His will left 300 oils and 19,400 sketches and watercolors to the nation, and his money to a fund for those whom he must have thought of as his likenesses: "male decayed artists living in England." Distant but grasping relatives, however, made off with most of Turner's bequest, which has largely remained out of sight ever since.

"Tinted Steam." "Indistinctness is my forte," Turner declared while whirling his images into vortexes of color. On occasion, nature vied with his vision. When he was 59, London's Houses of Parliament were gutted by fire. Turner, who rarely used more than a pencil to sketch out-of-doors, rushed to the bank of the Thames to brush out nine water-colors of the burning buildings (see opposite). He even blotted his copybook pages against each other in his eagerness to capture that dramatic scene. A romantic's delirium, it was the apocalypse brought to reality--the flames mirrored in the water, the starry skies burning with feverish color.

To his contemporaries, such works were full of unrecognizable "blots." Constable, also experimenting in colored light, labeled Turner's work "tinted steam." It was a shrewd perception for, in the days of the burgeoning Industrial Revolution, Turner eventually abandoned trite old themes to depict railway trains and steamships roiling, almost defiantly and often indistinctly, through mist and fog. When he titled a painting Sunrise with a Boat Between Headlands, the subject was neither topography nor the boat, which is a barely visible blob, but light refracted by mist.

Aerial Auroras. Turner scorned the highly varnished, precisely glazed look of a "finished" painting. He wanted his paintings to show virtuoso brushwork (sometimes he even daubed with bread rather than bristles). Before exhibitions opened at the Royal Academy, artists traditionally varnished their canvases in sight of the public. Turner, instead, completed his. Spectators gawked as the academician, in top hat and frock coat, stood on a bench daubing away at his already hung oils. With his color box beside him, he mixed pigments in whatever was handy, even stale beer, to touch up details that would provide some visual reference for his baffled viewers. Once, a colorful Constable outshone one of Turner's seascapes. Turner put onto his work a splotch of bright red the size of a shilling that drew eyes away from the Constable. The next day Turner shaped it into a channel buoy.

Turner called clouds "ensanguined sun." Long before the impressionists, he discovered that light is color and let it rule his art, experimented with reflections of light in metal balls. He studied the German poet Goethe's book on color theory, which ascribed brooding, anxious sensations to green, blue and purple as opposed to the liveliness of yellow, red and orange.

His ideal was what he called a "pure combination of aerial colors." To realize it, he divorced local color from the separate images in his paintings, instead expanded it into vast scrims and screens that radiated like auroras in the sky. He became one of the first modern artists by bending nature to the service of art and by proving that art can refine the way man looks at nature. The bridge between was light. No wonder that Turner's purported last words were "Sun is God."

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