issuevoter wrote on Jan 21
st, 2017 at 10:19pm:
I watched Mr Turner, on SBS. The story of J Turner the British artist of renown. I am familiar with his most famous paintings like The Fighting Temeraire, and Chichester Canal, but I wonder if the average TV viewer would, or even care to look at them.
This is a remarkable production not just for the attention to detail in creating an 1830s period piece. The work involved in every scene is art in itself. But the script writing and direction is flawless and incredibly poignant. The actors are outstanding, and the lead Timothy Spall gives what may eventually be his definitive performance. But this production is so well done that you would almost expect it, in a time of tawdry cinema fantasy and thrills, to be doomed to failure.
That Turner, who died in 1851, was a far more "modern" artist than any of the French Impressionists, is hardly a matter of dispute. (The only French landscape artist of the late 19th century who can survive any comparison with him is Monet.) Turner's Vesuvius in Eruption, 1817—"a reddened, yellowed and delicious horror," one of his contemporaries called it—is extravagantly spontaneous, the washes cut and scratched back to white with a knife or a brush handle, but it sums up the strange modernity of his techniques.
Nobody else exploited the transparency of watercolor as thoroughly as Turner. He reversed the traditional method of painting on a dark ground and working up to the high tones. The basic ground of Turner's watercolors is white, reflected light. In watercolors like Vesuvius, and more so in his opalescent canalscapes of Venice, Turner stated the identity of light and color as no previous artist had done. "They are pictures of the elements," wrote William Hazlitt in 1816. "The artist delights to go back to the first chaos of the world." From that chaos, a great deal of what we now call modernism was due to be born.
Robert Hughes
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