Mixed message

Turner and the Masters
Tate Britain, until 31 January 2010

Professor David Solkin, this exhibition’s curator, opens his introductory chapter in the catalogue (a substantial tome, packed with scholarly exegesis, special exhibition price £19.99 in paperback) in the following way: 

The first 15 words of that quote should be emblazoned over the lintel of every art school in the land, though it would mean that the teachers therein would have to be capable of demonstrating its truth; tragically, I’m not convinced that many of them are capable of doing so. Be that as it may, this exhibition sets out to demonstrate Turner’s complex relationship with his artistic predecessors and contemporaries by bringing together over 100 pictures from all over the world, both by Turner himself and by the other artists he copied and challenged. The show is in theory a great idea, in fact a risky enterprise. As Professor Solkin is the first to admit, Turner is not always shown in the most flattering light when compared with the Old Masters. Yet he continued to set himself up in this way, as much out of a spirit of rivalry and insecurity, as artistic ambition and the desire to make money. He risked his reputation to augment his reputation in a typically Turnerian way.

Ruskin noted that people dismissed Turner as vulgar and unintellectual. He wrote: ‘This I knew to be impossible. I found in him a somewhat eccentric, keen-mannered, matter-of-fact, English-minded gentleman: good-natured evidently, bad-tempered evidently, hating humbug of all sorts, shrewd, perhaps a little selfish, highly intellectual, the powers of his mind not brought out with any delight in their manifestation, or intention of display, but flashing out occasionally in a word or a look.’ It’s that keenness that fuelled the competitive spirit in Turner and accounted for the strange mixture of successes and failures in this show.