I went the the Boston Museum of Fine Arts today to view a new exhibit of JMW Turner – “Turner’s Modern World” – and frankly didn’t enjoy it. In the moment it really bothered me, because while I’ve always thought of Turner as the most modern of pre-Impressionist painters, and have loved seeing him in the Tate and elsewhere in London, today I just didn’t enjoy the exhibit at all. It frustrated me: how can I love an artist and his (or her) work, but reject an exhibition of that work and that artist?
What I thought about on the drive back to Scarborough – it’s a good two hours depending on traffic, and despite it being a Saturday, for reasons I couldn’t figure out the traffic was lousy – listening to a mix tape I had put together but had not figured out whether to send or not, and then when that was done listening to CBC’s Saturday afternoon line up of The Debaters and Under the Influence and of course Because News, was this dichotomy. It reminded me of a previous John Singer Sargent exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago that I had been to – but it was different. The Sargent exhibit was fantastic, even though it made me question just how great a painter I thought Sargent was. The Turner exhibit today didn’t change my view of Turner, but it made me think “wow, I really wasted my time today.” Which was even worse: I love looking at beautiful art, paintings in particular. To think that my time had been wasted, that I could have been doing other things (namely, reading the next book club selection) that I’d have enjoyed that much more, but instead drove a total of four hours, spent $20 on parking, and the only thing on the plus side of the equation was a delicious omelette and a starter course of escargot at a Boston bistro, really bothered me.
The answer, of course, is all about curation. The easy answer was that there was just a ridiculous explosion of too much Turner: they should have broken it up somewhat, they should have stretched it out, let each piece live on its own, had fewer total pieces. But that’s ridiculous, and actually as the curatorial notes alluded to, would have sort of been a betrayal of JMW Turner himself. He thought rather highly of himself, was a bit of a showman, and was constantly pushing for the Royal Academy back in his day to grant him exclusive shows, even though even back then there was an awareness that too much Turner in one place was a bad idea, like eating too many fried clams on the beach in summer time. Yes, delicious; but taken to extremes, your entire being just rejects it, and ultimately you risk destroying your enjoyment of fried seafood (or the preview of Impressionism and Expressionism that Turner represents, to bring us out of the clam shack analogy) in the future.
The curatorial choices were, in that regard, actually good ones: this was designed to be a surfeit of Turner, it was built to be over the top. The lighting choices were – until the final room – chosen with an eye towards what JMW would have been showing in back in the 1840s; the stacking of paintings in line with what a Royal Academy annual would have done had they granted a wall to him without breaking it up with a Gainsborough or a generic set of Derby horseflesh in oil or a boring but well-executed and celebrity-friendly group portrait of the Regent and his birthday entourage. That solid wall of explosive colour, so modern and imaginative and ruthlessly out of keeping with Congress of Vienna era norms, though, would have never been granted Turner back then because he was so odd; had he been, it would have been a kind of violation, and probably even his fans back then like Ruskin would have said “too much”. They surely knew – intuitively if not consciously – that he could only have his genius come to the surface by comparing it to the tired sea battle scenes and portraiture and landscapes, however competently painted, of his contemporaries.
I think part of the problem was that I visited my favourite MFA gallery to kill the half hour before my timed entry ticket kicked in, the gallery with the Copleys and the Wests and the “American” portraits of the late 18th century, so precise and glossy and realistic, portraiture predecessors of the hyperrealism of Chuck Close and Richard Estes, only with powdered wigs and knit stockings which, of course, represent fantasy to us today and thus allow us to break the notion of “hyperrealism” that the painting technique implies. The MFA has an almost comical Benjamin West group portrait of the Hope family – a banking family from Boston who oddly made their money in the Netherlands – which looks strikingly like the montage portrait that freezes at the end of the intro to Soap, a totally age-inappropriate situation comedy that my grandmother loved watching with me and probably warped me for life. The Hope family portrait is stunning in a way that has nothing whatsoever to do with Turner, even though it was painted roughly at the same time as Turner’s first major works. But rather than either seeming anachronistic, thought of together, they seem as relevant and perfectly capable of juxtaposition as what one might imagine as the 20th century equivalent, a Wayne Theibaud California realist cityscape against Georgia O’Keefe’s clouds above New Mexico.
The other piece that bothered me, though, was a missing work – Turner’s famous painting of early rail, Rail, Steam and Speed, which I’ve seen in the National Gallery in London regularly, often, and just always blows me away. This isn’t fair to the curators, but given the strength of the MFA collection – they have a collection which rivals that of any museum in North America with the possible exception of the New York Met and the Chicago Art Institute – they should have been able to secure it for what was proposed as a comprehensive Turner modern world representative exhibit. As it was, the only “steam” on display came in maybe a half dozen steam ships, but nothing of the power and expression of fear of the modern acceleration that marks Turner’s paintings of rail. The absence of that element of his work – and the sorry replacement of it that the MFA’s curators attempted with lesser watercolours of mine entrances and forges, or his famously indistinct seascapes with early fully-rigged steamships – was not successful.
Turner – more than any French painter of the age, more than any American painter of the age – saw that what was characteristic of his world was change. Not dynamism per se, although he is rivalled in my mind only by Winslow Homer in his ability to show the power and action of the sea, exceeding any Dutch master in his understanding of storm clouds, approached and only occasionally exceeded by the designist precision of Rockwell Kent in his understanding of the purity of the colour of sky / sea / earth in one place. But more than any of them and only really inherited by future generations by rare instances, by Ray Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns who saw the impact of media in the same way he understood the impact of speed and connection, Turner was a master. The MFA exhibit, though, missed the point. Turner saw that the world was changing, but the exhibit was less about that understanding than it was about explosions.
Maybe in a time where movies have lost their focus on ambience and dialogue and focus instead on comic book narratives and colour, and in a time where in political dialogue we ignore the potential for collaboration because its simpler to live in echo chambers of self-reinforcing violence, the MFA exhibit makes sense. But it ignores what makes Turner great.
Thinking about it a little more, part of that greatness is his prescience, which was alluded to (ironically) in a quote from a security guard that was at the end of the exhibit. The MFA, in its final gallery which had no paintings, had a wall of pictures of MFA staff, and how they’ve reacted to Turner’s work in their careers. The security guard had a posting in the room with Turners The Slave Ship; the guard is African-American, and he insightfully pointed out that the picture was painted well after the Atlantic slave trade was over: such ships no longer plied the seas. He understood that Turner was seeing a deeper, more lasting injustice that still existed, and that the muscle memory of being chattel was something with a much longer fuse than simply Wilberforce’s campaign to end the trade could put out.
Turner was, really, a prophet, whose communication was in paint. He saw over the horizon what other artists – Hopper, Kent, Dali – would have to contend with in the full force of lived reality, but he recognised it even in its birth in Birmingham and Liverpool and on the Great Western Railway viaduct. He was to visual arts what McLuhan or Walter Benjamin were to our understanding of media. And despite that, despite the name of their exhibit, the MFA just liked throwing up lots of pictures of waves and fog and ships.
On the plus side, lunch was truly special. If you’re in Boston in the near future, I highly recommend Aquitaine, on Tremont Street. And if you’re heading north to Maine, seriously, it might seem convoluted, but take I-93 North to Route 128 – the Tobin Bridge route that gets you up through Danvers always seems shorter on paper, but just don’t do it.