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Boston Globe
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Turner unbound: Yale revisits the radical painter's journey
I say this as a certifiable Turner freak, a sucker for every painterly gnash and flourish. 'Romance and Reality' delivers the goods upfront: At the entry hangs 'Staffa, Fingal's Cave,' from 1832, a dark symphony of painterly menace. The lurch of an ashen sea collides with bleached light from above, casting sandy cliffs in a meaty fleshtone through hoary mist; a frigate steams into coal-black fog towards a smouldering sun sunk into the horizon as it 'burst(s) through the raincloud, angry ,' in Turner's own words. Ah. J.M.W. Turner, "Harlech Castle, from Tygwyn Ferry by Summer's Evening Twilight," 1799. (Yale Center for British Art) Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection Critics, then and now, haven't bothered to suppress an eyeroll at Turner's penchant for the overwrought, and I'll admit to the occasional cringe of my own. Such is Turner, a high-order dramatist ever on the edge of schmaltz. But for me, his painterly might overpowers any misgivings, and any cringe is one of affection. Frank in his fury, he's the least British-seeming of Brits, an emotional powderkeg; that he's most-loved of all British artists ever might tell you something, too. Advertisement The mature Turner found an outlet for his fury in the righteous cause of abolition. One of the most powerfully harrowing paintings of all time, 'Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On),' 1840, now hangs at the MFA as part of its exhibition J.M.W. Turner, "On the Washburn," ca. 1815. (Yale Center for British Art) Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection A barber's son, born in an upstairs flat on Covent Garden when it was a seething market alive with the stink of livestock, Turner felt the roiling chaos of his time like few of his artistic peers, most of whom had the fine education and genteel upbringing of the upper class. A brash everyman with the gift of paint, Turner's work can feel like the furious explosion of the indignation of an entire social class ground down by indifferent elite rule – and at the MFA, by design, it surely did. Advertisement Yale, meanwhile, provides less a point of view than a Turner 101, a sample platter arranged by era and theme. The Center for British Art has more — and more significant — Turners in its collection than any other outside the United Kingdom. That saidEven so, I approached it with a little pre-emptory disappointment; I like my Turner unrestrained – raging fire-and-brimstone against the ills of the world, flexing his painterly muscle Stallone-like. 'Romance and Reality' is laid out almost primly, in chronological order, leading off with a hesitant young artist following the romantic realist tradition in his depictions of the British countryside. Inverary Pier, Loch Fyne: Morning, ca. 1845, oil on canvas. (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection) Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection By mistake, I went the wrong way – the exhibition is a loop, entry and exit at the same point – and found much satisfaction in traveling the Turner timeline backwards, frontloading the experimental élan of his later years and meandering Benjamin Button-like back to his formative phase. To truly understand Turner – his unceasing yearning to move ever forward, to never stand pat – there's something deeply inspiring in working backwards from his dying breaths. Turning right at 'Staffa, Fingal's Cave,' I was in the exhilarating embrace of a section titled 'Tragic Vision' – cue the mournful string section of a movie soundtrack – and a suite of Turners so softly indistinct as to almost be breath hanging on winter air. Made in the final decade of his life, Turner was reaching ever further beyond the known, unmoored from this mortal plane and transported by the end of his brush. 'Inverary Pier, Loch Fyne: Morning,' 1845, made a half-dozen years before his death, feels like Turner becalmed: its glow beatific, its cliffs inchoate and dreamy through a misty gloaming. 'Squally Weather,' a small piece painted sometime between 1840 and 1845, knots shadow and light into a dense bundle, a storm of emotional tumult. Advertisement J.M.W. Turner, "Dort, or Dordrecht: The Dort Packet-Boat from Rotterdam Becalmed," 1818. (Yale Center for British Art). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection Turner's life may straddle the 18th and 19th centurycq, but he's often cited as the first Modern painter, though he died decades before the term was born. His loose, furious brushwork and wild sense of color inspired Impressionists like Monet and Pissaro, Modernism's vanguard. And in the hazy depths of his emotional landscapes, it's no reach to see the roots of Abstract Expressionism, a fury of feeling devised by a cohort of American painters after World War II. Indeed, thousands of watercolors discovered in his overstuffed home after his death – so disordered, one critic wrote, 'it might have been the scene of a murder' – feel, in hindsight, like clear lineage: stacks of papers stained and smeared with explosive color appear almost to be abstract experiments. Advertisement J.M.W. Turner, "Mer de Glace, in the Valley of Chamoix," 1803. (Yale Center for British Art) Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection Tracking backwards through Turner's life feels like being witness to a parallel version of art history, of an artist ever straining against convention even as he mastered it. 'Dort, or Dordrecht: The Dort Packet-Boat from Rotterdam Becalmed' (he did love his titles), from 1818, might be a standard maritime scene of its day -- stiff, traditional crisply-painted, with particular attention to the billow and shade of the tallship's sails – but for the teem of humanity Turner loads into it, a scene overflowing with labor and action. Turner's gifts were so abundant that he could do anything; instead, he did everything , and supremely well. The Yale show will give you that; a selection of his early watercolor landscapes are confounding in their precision, a young Turner bending the most capricious of media with uncanny ease. Subtly, it includes its counterpoints; 'Mer de Glace, in the Valley of Chamoix,' 1803, a mountain scene painted when he was just 28, lurches leftward as though blown by the wind with such violent verve your own feet wobble. J.M.W. Turner, "The Evening Gun," ca 1825. (Yale Center for British Art) Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection And in easy eyeshot of 'Dort' is a wall of Turner's prints, the bulk of them in ashen and coal-black tones. The range of mastery confounds, from near-photographic clarity to the fog of the barely recognizable: The gothic arches of Kirstall Abbey, its every stone seam in high relief, astounds; nearby, the cascading shadow of 'Catania, Sicily,' subsumed in its black fog, feels almost Rothko-esque. No Turner is without its own provocation and mystery. Yale might be painting by numbers, but Turner never could. Advertisement Murray Whyte can be reached at
Forbes
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Yale Center For British Art Reopening In New Haven, CT
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven. The British (artworks) are coming (back)! The Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, CT reopens March 29, 2025, following two years of conservation construction, again welcoming the public–for free–to enjoy the largest collection of British art outside the United Kingdom. Renovations to replace the iconic 1977 Louis I. Kahn designed modernist museum's roof, skylights, and lighting systems help safeguard both the building and its artworks. Inside, a full reinstallation of the permanent collection unites the YCBA's historic and contemporary pieces in an uninterrupted chronological sequence. Curators took care in following the lead of where the artworks took them. '(Previously) we tried to use paintings to tell stories, whereas now, we're letting the paintings tell the story, a slight reversal of emphasis,' Martina Droth, Paul Mellon Director at the Yale Center for British Art, told The YCBA's core collection and landmark building were a gift to Yale University from the collector and philanthropist Paul Mellon (Yale College, Class of 1929). What stories are the paintings telling? A 'challenging' story in Droth's words. Visitors will find more than arcadian Constable landscapes and genteel Gainsborough portraits of aristocrats. 'The history of the British Empire, obviously, involved Britain spreading its footprint, moving into other countries, colonizing other countries, and exploiting other places,' Droth said. 'An example of a painting that tells that story is an early depiction of the island of Barbados that shows the island having been colonized by the British and having been turned into a sugar colony through the production of slave labor, and you can see it in the painting. So when I say challenging, it's to acknowledge that a lot of the art that was made over five centuries tell the story of all aspects of what Britain was about, politically, globally, economically.' Global is another point of emphasis. Britain was and is an empire once so vast it was famously said the sun never set on it. 'British art' was created by artists born in Britain who left to work in Europe and around the world as well as by artists from Europe and around the world who came to work in Britain. Almost half the works on view were made by artists not born in Britain or artists who left Britain to make their careers elsewhere. 'There's a lot of movement that is simply part of the history of British art and part of the collection that we have; it's inherently an international story rather than an island story,' Droth said. The new installation places iconic works such as John Constable's paintings of rural England alongside never-before exhibited works from the founding collection, such as William Daniell's newly conserved A View in China: Cultivating the Tea Plant (ca. 1810). Other highlights include classic treasures by George Stubbs and Thomas Gainsborough alongside bold works by contemporary artists such as Cecily Brown, bridging centuries through shared themes and formal explorations. New acquisitions also allow the Center to show the vital role that women played in the history of British art, with major works by Mary Beale, Maria Spilsbury, and Emma Soyer. J. M. W. Turner, 'Inverary Pier, Loch Fyne: Morning,' ca. 1845, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Born 250 years ago this year, Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) was one of the most virtuosic and complex artists of the 19th century. Many consider him the greatest British artist ever. Many go further than that, calling him the forbearer of Impressionism and nothing less than the father of Modern art. The YCBA reopens with a special exhibition, 'J. M. W. Turner: Romance and Reality,' (through July 27, 2025) the first show there focusing on Turner in more than 30 years. 'We have an amazing Turner collection. We don't just have a handful of paintings by Turner, we have almost 3,000 works by Turner including works on paper and prints and drawings and sketchbooks,' Droth said. 'We can trace his whole career through our collection. He started with careful topographical drawings. He trained in how to draw architecture and ruins and classical landscapes. Then you can see him developing his style and becoming very interested in the quality of light and the sky. You can see his style evolve.' The one-time child prodigy's style evolved over a 60-year career into the revolutionary landscape paintings for which those 'father of Impressionism' and 'first Modern artist' plaudits were applied. 'By the time you get to the end (of his life), some of the paintings that he made almost dissolve into close to abstraction,' Droth explained. 'Interestingly, they still show place, but you wouldn't necessarily know it, because it's become so ethereal and so much about the atmosphere of water and sky and clouds.' 'Romance and Reality' features the YCBA's most iconic Turner oil paintings alongside outstanding watercolors and prints, and the artist's only complete sketchbook outside of the British Isles. Together they reveal his astounding technical skill and the powerful combination of profound idealism with his acute awareness of the tragic realities of human life. Tracey Emin, 'You Kept it Coming,' 2019, acrylic on canvas, private collection. Reopening the Center with Turner was an obvious choice. A companion solo exhibition for Tracey Emin (b. 1963), perhaps less so. Not to Droth. 'As the Yale Center for British Art, we're very conscious that we are a center of the whole story of British art,' she said. 'Some people might be familiar with Turner, and some people might be familiar more with contemporary art. We tell the whole story, and we can put an artist like Tracey Emin into a historical context. Tracey Emin is one of the foremost artists working in Britain today. She has never had a solo museum exhibition in the United States.' That fact is astonishing considering Emin's been a leading transatlantic voice in contemporary art since the 1990s. Many of the paintings on view in the show have never been shown in a museum anywhere. 'A lot of people have heard of Tracey Emin, but you rarely see her work in museums,' Droth said. 'You might see a neon, or you might see one of her applique blanket works, but you never see her work in quantity and her paintings have been overlooked. Our mission is to be a place that introduces this culture into North America.' Emin explores deeply personal experiences confronting timely issues about female sexuality and women's bodies. Her paintings lay bare intimate and private experiences that veer from the prosaic to the most profound and life-affirming aspects of being a woman. Through her raw portrayal of the female form, Emin challenges traditional depictions of women in art, centering instead on the authenticity of lived experience. In layman's terms, she keeps it real. Emin's paintings may initially strike visitors as provocative. 'I find her paintings less and less provocative and more and more, not about provoking, but about processing an experience,' Droth said. 'She offers us a way of thinking about how we process emotions from ordinary things that happen–from love, from grief, from feeling abandoned–all those things that happen to each of us, that we process internally. I find her paintings are her way of externalizing that and creating these universal things.' Droth hopes people take the time with Emin's work to move past first impressions. 'I'm drawn in by paintings you can read in multiple ways, paintings that evoke feelings and emotions; you're trying to work out what you're looking at. I'm hoping this will happen when people go to the show, they take time,' she said. 'The more time you spend with (Emin's paintings), the more they give you.' Emin and Turner do have more in common than their nationality and profession. Both were shaped by time spent in the coastal town of Margate. Turner had a fascination with the sea bordering on fetish. The sketchbook on view in 'Romance and Reality,' his 1845 'Channel Sketchbook,' was used on the artist's last journey across the English Channel and contains views of the coastline around Margate where he spent much time during his childhood and old age. Emin was raised and continues spending part of each year in Margate. 'The way Tracey described it, Turner and her shared this history in Margate where they spent significant parts of their career. She said, 'I'm looking at a sunset; Turner looked at the same sunset. We looked at the same ocean over this long period of time,'' Droth explained. 'She wants to see herself as coming out of a British tradition of art making, and painting in particular. I don't want to overplay the connection between them, but again, it's about saying that there is a history of British art here over the centuries and Turner and Emin exemplify those two ends of the spectrum.' 'Tracey Emin: I Loved You Until The Morning' can be seen through August 10, 2025.
