In scale, in scope, in sheer excellence, the Royal Academy's retrospective of the works of Joseph Mallord William Turner (which runs until March 2, 1975) is the most important art exhibition held in either England or the U.S. in the past five years. Two hundred years have passed since Turner was born in a cellar in Maiden Lane and his reputation has never ceased to grow. In this show, it gets its due from an institution that Turner always regarded with filial piety. There are 650 oils, watercolors, prints and drawings on view, too many to see in one day. In their range—from the earliest imitative watercolors of picturesque scenery, through the imitations of Claude, the French landscapist, the seascapes, the Italian scenes, and so on to the Beethoven-like grandeur of the last landscapes—they form the best pos sible introduction to this coarsely explicit but mysterious Englishman.
Vast Range. Turner's was not a "normal" life but a long exertion. He had little art training. His father, a Covent Garden wigmaker, exploited him, egging him on to turn out hundreds of bread-and-butter illustrations. His mother died mad, which seems to have inhibited Turner from trusting women; for sex he went to dockside whores, and for security and approval he turned to an institution, the Royal Academy. Nearly all his emotional energies were displaced into his work. Its sheer volume was astounding: the British Museum alone has 19,000 watercolors, color notes and travel drawings. Turner's creativity, which rivaled Picasso's, meant ceaseless travel in search of motifs—over the Alps, around Italy, across France, throughout England. But the work remained in England. Thus the Royal Academy had a vast range of work to choose from, and it is hardly possible that a better Turner show can ever be mounted. It is a triumph of scholarship and taste, but especially it is a triumph for Turner and, in a way, for his country; for it now seems not only that Turner was the greatest artist England ever produced, but that the most profound romantic artist in 19th century Europe was an Englishman.
Nobody could be less like the French romantics than was Turner, with his cobbled-to-gether education, his stinginess and gruff bearing. But no 19th century painter, not even Cezanne, has changed our perception of landscape more radically. This is an opportune show, coming as it does when American formalism is dead and an interest in content is reviving. For Turner was a master of meaning, and to see him as a modern artist (which he was) means leaving the formalist hierarchies on one side.