We all have favorite memories like the playground of our childhood or the playground we dragged our children to. Our desire to hang on to these memories is often both a fierce and futile attempt to escape death, a place which has never nor will ever see a sun or moon. In Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino, his masterpiece recently purchased by the Getty, J.M.W. Turner accomplishes this impossibility by solidifying his glimmering memory of a Rome where the dreamy moon and the bright logical sunshine occupy the same sky. Painted in grey England, this brilliant painting, although inaccurate, is visually understandable in its desire. Our elegant Getty host informs us that, in his competitive desire to stand out, Turner often enhanced his paintings after they were installed, increasing the brightness and the emotive power of pure color against the more gloomy landscapes of his competitors.
To the right in the next room, one can see another Turner painting of ships sea and sky. This painting is the opposite – instead of trying to solidify a dream by drenching it in intense light, Turner almost obliterates the objects (boats) with atmosphere and emotion made of color and brushstrokes. It is sublime, a mixture of awe and the terror of shattering form, accomplished without the usual hint of darkness…if competitiveness can produce this effect, then I am going to start drinking envy instead of water.
Turner was just painting boats, boats submitting to nature’s poetic power, but he was the first to break the form, and even if it was an accident, it resounded in the art world like the big bang, where form suddenly shatters giving birth to new life, artistic Abstraction. What followed was not as beautiful or graceful as submission but it was far more entertaining…a sort of butchery practiced mostly on the female body: how to cut up, flatten, rearrange and unpaint the body. Duchamp’s cold dissection of the nude descending the stairs is painful. Her body is fractured by time, an equally painful human invention. Picasso offered her up to the God of design. In his countless abstractions of the female face, she is inhuman but still alive, a beautiful monster of artful plastic surgery. Trundling off on her gurney from artist to artist, no longer a symbol or an idealization, she is massacred by de Kooning, eviscerated by Bacon (my favorite), starved by Giacometti, and so on, all in the name of artistic expression, otherwise known as human invention.
Turner’s abstraction was a dissolving into divine light and water, a releasing of its shape so it could join a cosmic unity. Clarity has been replaced by mystery – the fear of loss holding back the hope of gaining a new higher reality. Mind you this joining of the universal is not my thing and I’m not sure it was Turner’s, but there is no denying the magic, even if we don’t know what we are looking at until we hear Octavio Paz describing it as a concept. Whatever Turner’s motive was, the desire to paint light, color and feeling is equivalent to seeking the Holy Grail in my book. No one ever succeeds again…until Rothko.
Artillery Magazine Vol 6 no. 1 September/October 2011