A new exhibition at Tate
Britain makes us ask questions about Turner's late style, says Mark Hudson
By Mark Hudson
Vigorous blue brush marks add a
threatening, thunderous tone to an image which at first glance appears
completely abstract, in which the ostensible focus of interest, Bamburgh Castle
in Northumberland, is shown simply as a blank area of paper, as though the
great mass of medieval stone had been reduced to a dazzling blur of reflected
light. This is one of Turner’s later watercolours, Bamborough [sic]Castle,
Northumberland, painted in 1837 when he was 62, and featured in Tate Britain’s
new exhibition Late Turner: Painting Set Free.
It’s an image that crystallises
our idea of the great British painter as a proto-modernist, a revolutionary
figure who paved the way for the Impressionists and the Abstract
Expressionists, and who embodies an idea that has gained increasing currency in
the way we think about art: Late Style.
There are artists who died
young or in their prime. There are artists who went on repeating the ideas of
their maturity into feeble old age. And there is a small and select band of
artists who were able to go on developing and experimenting into their final
years, whose last works become a distillation of everything they’ve done before,
transcending the barriers of taste and time: Titian was one of them, so were
Michelangelo, Goya, Hokusai, Matisse and, not least, Turner himself.
I’ll never forget seeing
Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas when it was first shown in the West at the Royal
Academy’s Genius of Venice exhibition in 1983. The painting, one of a number
found in Titian’s studio at the time of his death in 1576 aged 89, and which
had been hidden away for centuries in a remote palace in the Czech Republic,
had a blasted rawness, a disregard for classical finish that made the other
Renaissance paintings around it look effete in comparison.
At a time when the so- called
New Image Painters – Baselitz, Schnabel and co – were reviving interest in
neo-expressionist painting, the existential cruelty of Titian’s painting, in
which a satyr is skinned alive, seemed like a message from the past, telling us
that the truly great artist cannot so much transcend the infirmities of old age
– failing eyesight and diminished muscular control – as turn them into an
aspect of genius, in works that strip back to the essence of things, and which
can communicate to any age.
It’s notion that has lost none
of its potency. Look at the Matisse cut-outs exhibition which has rammed them
in at Tate Modern. When art and culture supposedly belong to the young, when
curators look to artists in their twenties to tell us where art is going, what
we actually want to see, it seems, is the work of an eighty year old painter
too weak to hold a brush, who resorted to scissors in creating images of
life-enhancing freedom and joie de vivre.
In the Late Style theory of
artistic development, the inevitable loosening of technique becomes a mark not
of increasing enfeeblement, but of how certain artists have been able to sum up
the whole of art in one career, with an apparently inevitable trajectory from
the representational to the abstract, from the classical to the romantic, from
the rational to the intuitive.
But has late style become
something we perceive even when it isn’t there?
Certainly it’s used by
gallerists and curators to lend profundity to the later works of just about any
minor artist. How well does it reflect what Turner was actually doing in the
latter part of his career? Are his most radical and apparently abstract works
really all ‘late’ as we tend almost inevitably to assume?
‘The problem with looking at
Turner in terms of late style is that it removes him from the 19th century
world he inhabited,’ says Sam Smiles, co-curator of the Tate exhibition. ‘The idea
of late style is bound up with the notion that the artist has moved so far
beyond the expectations of their audience they have no one to talk to. Their
work becomes hermetic and self-referential, communicating better with other
ages than their own. But this never happened with Turner. He’d absorbed the
idea from Joshua Reynolds, the great artist of the previous generation, of the
artist as a public figure, a valuable member of society, with a responsibility
to dignify the role of the artist. Turner never lost sight of that. He was
looking at contemporary events: the building of the railways and the burning
down of the Houses of Parliament. He was still looking for new patrons. The
elderly Turner was still very much engaged with his time.’
Far from being a marginalised
bohemian, as we like to imagine our romantic artists, Turner was very well
known and financially very comfortable in late age, if not super- rich.
Nonetheless, the stocky, gruff, resolutely ungenteel artist was seen as a
maverick, his later works ridiculed in the press for their apparent
formlessness. Turner was notorious for hanging works at the Royal Academy that
appeared in Smiles’s words ‘barely there’, then turning up on Varnishing Day –
when academicians were permitted to make last minute adjustments – and turning
them into finished paintings on the spot.
The notion of late style
developed in the early 19th century, when musicologists and literary critics of
the German Romantic movement, began reassessing the late works of Beethoven and
Goethe. Until then, artistic biography had followed the rise-and-decline model
popular since the Renaissance, in which artists peaked in their forties,
followed by a rapid decline. But in the ferment of the Romantic era when art
from outside the mainstream – folk art and children’s art – began to be valued
for the first time, the idiosyncrasies of Beethoven’s late string quartets and
late Goethe works such as Faust came to be seen as evidence not of senile
eccentricity, but of a stark and summative final vision.
The idea of late style wasn’t
applied to the visual arts until late that century, but it rapidly gained
ground to the extent that most of us now take it for granted that the raw and
the fragmentary are preferable to the classically polished, that Michelangelo’s
late, primal Slaves are more moving than the slick, early David, that Goya’s
nightmarish Black Paintings, created when he was in his seventies and isolated
by deafness, are incomparably greater than his more finished early works.
In short we like the products
of late style because they tend to look like the art we like most,
Impressionism and the Abstract Expressionism of Pollock and Rothko.
‘Late style gained currency at
a time when Impressionism was in vogue among art historians,’ says Smiles. ‘So
whatever they saw in earlier art that looked impressionistic, in late Titian,
Velasquez and Turner, was acclaimed as proto-modern. Turner’s emergence as a
proto-modernist vindicated Britain in the early 20th century, a time when
British art was marginalised. But Turner is never simply about the analysis of
form or visual effect in the way that say Impressionism is. He never loses
sight of the human narrative.’
Certainly Turner didn’t benefit
in his own lifetime from the late style theory. Even his greatest champion, the
critic John Ruskin, accepted the prevailing view that an artist’s work would
inevitably tail off in his final years. Yet isn’t it likely that many of
Turner’s quintessential ‘late works’ – and classic examples of late style generally
– look the way they do because they simply aren’t finished, rather than because
that is the way the artist intended them to look?
Smiles argues not. ‘Turner was
producing sketches that were very free, that you might assume to be ‘late’,
from quite early in his career certainly from the 1800s.But the paintings he
was producing from these were relatively conventional. As his career progressed
the gap between his sketch book experiments and his finished paintings narrowed
till he was exhibiting works that his contemporaries could hardly accept as
works of art at all.’
Works such as the swirling
maelstrom of Snow Storm Steam Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth, which we now consider
one of Turner’s greatest masterpieces, baffled his contemporaries; even Ruskin
believed it should not have been shown. Yet at the same time he was producing
more finished works, such as The Fighting Temeraire, which were hugely popular.
The question of finish is
complicated by the Bequest, Turner’s magnificent gift of the contents of his
studio to the nation, now housed in Tate Britain. Alongside paintings that had
been exhibited at the Academy, that can be assumed to be pretty much as Turner
intended them to be seen, are many in various states of incompleteness – how
incomplete we’ll probably never know. Among them is ‘Norham Castle, Sunrise,
which Smiles believes is almost certainly unfinished, but which has become one
of the nation’s favourite paintings, with its luminous masses of colour, its
single cow reflected in a liquidescent plane, which may be water or simply the
reflected light of the rising sun.
To a Victorian viewer, the idea
of looking at an unfinished painting would have been perplexing. But nowadays
most of us aren’t so bothered if a painting is ‘finished’ if it looks right to
us. We’re less burdened than our forebears by questions of perfection and
permanence. We accept that there’s little in life that is definitively
completed, that the boundaries between things and states of being and the
spaces around them are a lot more provisional than we once believed. That much
modern science has taught us.
But the great exemplars of late
style got to that sense of cosmic uncertainty long before today’s physicists –
in a stark realisation of the vanity of earthly institutions and understanding,
but an exhilaration too in finding a few last moments of energy and
inspiration, a vindication by the creative process itself.
That’s why the final works of
Titian, Michelangelo and Turner still speak to us as ‘modern’ even over
centuries. Faced with the great unknown these artists weren’t afraid to let on
how much they still didn’t know.