Bloated Turner Show Arrives at Met Museum in Blaze of Colors

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July 1 (Bloomberg) -- Against all expectations, the first J.M.W.Turner survey to reach New York in 40 years has landed with a thud.
In its presentation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art , ``J.M.W. Turner'' is astonishing for all the wrong reasons.
Incredibly, this most dependable of cultural institutions seems tohave miscalculated the deadening impact of laying out 140 similarpaintings and drawings with little variation or context. The showserves up a Johnny One-Note whose brilliance was undermined by anaversion to experiment.
That was not the case.
London's Tate Gallery has good reason to award its annual artist prize in Turner's name.He was a proto-impressionist master of atmospheric effects whosenear-hallucinatory shipwrecks and snowstorms also anticipated boththe aggressive brushwork and transcendent spirit of abstractexpressionism.
Human vulnerability to the forces of nature was a common theme forTurner. Even his attempts at history painting, like the death of Lord Nelson during a naval battle or Hannibal crossing the Alps, pit theirheroic figures against the elements as much as the enemy at hand.
Though almost half of the works on view are loans from the Turner Bequest at Tate Britain, they do not all show the artist at the top of hisgame. Naturalism was not his strong suit. He executed so manypaintings in shades of yellow (lemon, ochre, buttercup, mustard,amber) that even a friend of Turner's wondered whether he had been``afflicted by yellow fever.''
Burning Parliament
This tendency reached an apogee with ``The Burning of the Houses ofParliament'' (1834), whose fiery pigments engulf the distantskeleton of Westminster Palace with cataclysmic vigor.
Lack of personal experience, though, didn't prevent him frompainting Rome burning or a mythical scene from Homer with an equalaffection for conflagration's golden glow. Nor did the absence ofsunlight deter Turner from painting the sky at night -- the moonalso can have a haunting aureole.
After a while, though, the redundancies of both palette and subjectin this show make it appear as if the prolific Turner spent a lotof time just playing to his market, turning out old favorites tomeet consumer demand. Turner did have powerful ambitions, not justto reach the sublime in his painting but to get rich and famousdoing it. Yet when he died, in 1851, his career was in almost totaleclipse.
The son of a Covent Garden barber, Joseph Mallord William Turnerwas born in London in 1775 and grew up to become something of aprodigy at the Royal Academy, then in the idealizing grip ofportraitist Joshua Reynolds .
The young Turner became enamored of the baroque landscapes of the17th-century Frenchman Claude Lorraine, and he also had thetemerity to raise the watercolor sketch to the level of painting.Yet it was Turner's gift for exacting heightened emotion from thediffusion of natural light that made his reputation and continuesto fascinate.
Grand Obsessions
At least it should. The Met has chosen a blow-by-blow presentationunrelieved by any attempt to reconsider Turner's bold abstractionsin the context of art today or to make something grand of hisobsessions.
Meanwhile, Turner's later seascapes, with their indeterminate forms(be they whales or boats or beaches) and textured, activebrushwork, look absolutely modern. That's especially true of thesix unfinished paintings that were left in the studio at Turner'sdeath.
To my eye, the austere, scratched and scraped, almost monochromaticsurfaces of ``Rough Sea'' and ``Seascape (Folkstone)'' are simplygorgeous. Their mystique does more to explain why Turner is sobeloved in Britain than anything else in this oddly sleepy show.
``J.M.W. Turner'' is on view through Sept. 21 at the MetropolitanMuseum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street. Corporate sponsor isBank of America, with additional support from Access Industries.Information: +1-212-535-7710; http://www.metmuseum.org .
( Linda Yablonsky is an art critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed areher own.)
To contact the writer of this review: Linda Yablonsky in New Yorkat fabyab@earthlink.net . Last Updated: July 1, 2008 00:01 EDT