Exhibition of the week Turner’s Modern World
Western Railway
Tate Britain, London SW1 (020-7887 8888, tate.org.uk). Until 7 March
J.M.W. Turner was a “passionate and engaged painter of modern life”, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. While his contemporaries devoted themselves to painting large historical scenes or images from Classical mythology, he concentrated on his own times. And what times those were: born in London in 1775 “into a world ruled by aristocrats and monarchs, where the horse was the fastest thing on Earth”, Turner lived through the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars; “the coming of trains, steamships, political reform and photography – and the abolition of the slave trade”. As this new exhibition at Tate Britain makes clear, he addressed all of this and more in his work, recording the industrialised world he saw developing around him with stunning originality. Bringing together around 150 paintings and drawings, from a smoggy view of the Thames to “staggering, almost abstract scenes of whaling in the Arctic” and exhilarating maritime pictures, it is packed with “painterly thrills”.
There are some extraordinary paintings here, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. One “standout” room features two of Turner’s greatest works:
(1844), his extraordinary vision of a new locomotive hurtling over Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Maidenhead Railway Bridge; and the “much-loved”
(1839), a “ghostly elegy about the passing of time” that features
Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great
The Fighting Temeraire
a grand but obsolete Napoleonic-era warship being towed away by a much smaller, steampowered tugboat to be scrapped. But such works aside, the exhibition is a dull one: heavy on historical context but short on visual splendour. And it doesn’t help that a painting key to its narrative – 1840’s “terrifying” with its unsparing depiction of the horrors of the slave trade – is present only in reproduction; the original was apparently too fragile to be sent over from the US.
Slave Ship,
A number of planned loans fell through owing to the uncertainty created by the pandemic, said Rachel CampbellJohnston in The Times. As a result, the show – for which the Tate charges up to £22 per ticket – is largely made up of works that one could normally see for free at the Tate or at The National Gallery. The shortage of loaned pieces might also explain why many of the works here feel “shoehorned in”: a dramatic scene depicting Hannibal and his army crossing the Alps in a snowstorm, for instance, has little to do with “the modern world”, but is included on the grounds that Turner saw the Carthaginian general “as a sort of Napoleonic precursor”; elsewhere, the curators’ claim that “an 1830 painting of people collecting bait on Calais sands” is a “meditation on war” seems tenuous at best. This show might conceivably “broaden your understanding” of Turner and his times. But all in all, it’s a bit of a disappointment.