One of the most famous stories attributed to JMW Turner (1775–1851) is that the painter, now 64 years old, boasted that he had himself tied to the mast of a steamboat in the middle of a snowstorm at night in order to observe the phenomenon close up. The image of Turner, the great sea dog, author of more than a thousand seascapes, crucified on a ship to be able to experience a fierce storm for himself, is certainly fascinating in its heroism, although it surely never happened, he says. David Blayney Brown, former Chief Curator of British Art at the Tate and curator of Light is Color , the major exhibition dedicated by the MNAC to one of the greatest painters of all time (from today, Friday, until September 11) .
Hardly a man has survived an experience like the one Turner referred to in connection with his famous Snowstorm, but it says a lot about his involvement in capturing extreme phenomena of nature, real or imaginary, at will. Snow Storm is not part of the Museu Nacional exhibition, but we can see it in the print on paper made by R. Brandard and which is now part of the British Museum collections.
Because there is much to see in this visit by Turner to Barcelona: more than a hundred works, including great oil paintings: seas that are agitated in such a lively way that they seem about to burst through the surface of the painting, tumultuous skies, shimmering and vaporous, fires and shipwrecks, threatening waves, black waters that sink you into a dangerous black hole and suns that ignite the rooms. But also watercolors and evanescent, almost abstract sketches. Not surprisingly, Turner's art, which was once at the forefront of European romanticism, greatly influenced artists such as Henri Matisse and Mark Rothko, and even today his footsteps can be followed by contemporaries such as Anselm Kiefer or Olafur Eliasson.
"He was a Rothko without knowing it and surely without wanting to be," says museum director Pepe Serra, happy to reconnect the MNAC with the great international museums, in this case the Tate, which has the largest collection of Turner's works, who bequeathed to the British government 400 oil paintings, between 200 and 300 of them unfinished, and 35,000 watercolors and sketches. These last ones constitute a sort of private collection that Turner never thought to show in public and that “used him both to experience and to remember what he had seen outdoors, whether it was a cloud, a rainbow or a wave breaking in the sea”, remembers Blayney Brown, who refutes the consideration of Turner as a precursor of abstraction, especially for his sketches and his last works, when thanks to the use of light the lines become blurred and the physical world practically disappears. "What marks abstraction is the elimination of meaning and Turner's work is full of meaning and emotion," he remarks.
He never lost his connection to reality, even when in the end, after a lifetime spent studying light, the sun transformed matter into energy. “The Sun is God”, were his last words. The Barcelona exhibition is one of the few in which oil paintings and sketches are shown together in the same rooms, which allows us to meddle in their world, "as if you were sneaking into their studio in the dark," says Serra, and to follow step by step your creative process. Discovering, for example, that a watercolor made in Grenoble in 1802 would not reach the painting until 1820 or that The fall of an avalanche in the Grisons , from 1810, comes from some sketches he took in the Swiss summer of 1802, recreating an avalanche of snow, which logically never witnessed.
His life story, too, was messy and combines a prodigious mixture of falsehood and authenticity. The son of a hairdresser and wig maker, he began exhibiting at the family establishment when he was ten years old. At fourteen he entered the Royal Academy as a student and signed his first exhibition when he was just 21. Eccentric and moody, his mother was committed to an insane asylum and he lived for years with his father while he was celebrated as the greatest painter of landscapes and seas. talented and famous of his time. Self-centered and ungenerous in business, he hated married men and he never married, although he had many mistresses and two daughters. He traveled tirelessly, often putting himself in physical danger, to find sights worth painting, and produced numerous erotic drawings - some of which are in the Tate's collection - but most were destroyed after his death by the critic and collector John Ruskin, his greatest admirer.
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