J.M.W. Turner at the Met

The huge Turner exhibit at the Met features paintings from every stage of the artist's career, from his earliest entries to the Royal Academy at age 15 to his late watercolors, considered by many contemporaries to be "the fruits of a diseased eye and a reckless hand." Lucky for us, a posthumous exhibit in 1906--as well as a big push from critic John Ruskin--saved his work from landscape obscurity.

Turner is best known for his incredible use of light; these paintings are so lit from within you could read by them in a dark room. Many of the works portray maritime mishaps, especially ship wrecks. At times the skies are as carefully crafted as the ships and their tiny, tormented sailors, as in Fishermen at Sea (1796). In Peace-Burial at Sea (1842), his rigor is contained to a single idea--grief--relentlessly pursued through the painting's unfathomable blackness. Other paintings, such as Ulysses, Deriding Polyphemus, Homer's Odyssey (1829), depict a sky full of telescopic wildness, a messy, sharply three-dimensional vortex of color. Few people who have seen the world look this way have come back to tell us about it.




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