Turner’s Late Paintings - New Passage
Art
"The subtitle of the Tate Britain’s recent show of J. M. W Turner’s late paintings is “Painting set free.” My query about the subtitle of Tate Britain’s show is “free from what?” In the 1960s, when Lawrence Gowing used the phrase to sum up Turner’s achievement,
it complimented him for having released painting from the dreary chore of mimesis. The destiny of the art, supposedly, was to become autonomous, which meant abstract, so that Turner, whose canvases looked to a contemporary detractor like “pictures of nothing”,
was acclaimed as a forerunner of Jackson Pollock with his labyrinths of dribbly pigment or Mark Rothko, whose panels resembled lakes of dried blood."
|
