Turner

Fülszöveg

The celebration in Francé, in 1974, of the centenary of Impressionism and in England, in 1975, of the bicentenary of the birth of Turner, has been the occasion for a striking demonstration of the part played by the greatest English landscape-painter in the most important pictorial revolution of the 19th century. No-one, indeed, can be regarded as a more obvious forerunner of Impressionist painting than Turner. But the most surprising thing about him is not that, forty years before Claude Monet, he discovered the means of expressing the way in which forms dissolve in light; the strangest thing is that this discovery was radically opposed to his own work, the work he had been doing for more than forty years, seeking to perfect himself within the terms of a Romantic-Classical esthetic whose ideál exponent, in his eyes, was Claude Lorrain. As a result of his break with his earlier ideas, his work falls into two distinct phases and presents a juxtaposition of styles that summarizes, in a... Tovább

Fülszöveg

The celebration in Francé, in 1974, of the centenary of Impressionism and in England, in 1975, of the bicentenary of the birth of Turner, has been the occasion for a striking demonstration of the part played by the greatest English landscape-painter in the most important pictorial revolution of the 19th century. No-one, indeed, can be regarded as a more obvious forerunner of Impressionist painting than Turner. But the most surprising thing about him is not that, forty years before Claude Monet, he discovered the means of expressing the way in which forms dissolve in light; the strangest thing is that this discovery was radically opposed to his own work, the work he had been doing for more than forty years, seeking to perfect himself within the terms of a Romantic-Classical esthetic whose ideál exponent, in his eyes, was Claude Lorrain. As a result of his break with his earlier ideas, his work falls into two distinct phases and presents a juxtaposition of styles that summarizes, in a manner unique in the history of painting, the transition from the classical to the modern period. The more or less complete disappearance of drawing in the watercolors of his last period, in which the « tachism » comes so close to abstraction, is all the more striking in that Turner, who taught perspective at the Royal Academy for many years, had long shown a predilection for architecture - cathedrals and castles - which he liked to portray with the topographical accuracy of an Italian « vedute » painter. The story of this London barber's son who became a painter of genius is thus a mine of precious information on the development of the artist's exceptional personality, his ambitions, his determination, the contradictions in his character and his extraordinary capacity for work. It is these multifarious aspects of his life and work that Jean Selz examines in this book, after passing many days studying the 20,000 drawings and watercolors by Turner in the British Museum. The author, to whom we are indebted for a number of monographs on painters in the present collection, has made a special study of the 19th century, notably in 19th Century Drawings and Watercolors. Vissza