Mr. Turner, Liberated by Art

A maestro of atmospheric climatic effects, the British romanticist landscape painter J.M.W. Turner was a lover, observer and depicter of wild unbridled nature and its destructive powers, with seafaring ships in peril a particular specialty.

Turner's strikingly original oil paintings, which set mid-19th century wags aflutter, were analogous to epic poems, with the implicit drama that comparison suggests. Liberated either by the confidence that accompanies maturity and experience, or by the urgency of time running out, it was in the last 15 years of his life, a period of feverish productivity between 1835 and 1850, characterized by range, ambition, constant experimentation and formal command, that Turner was freer than ever, his spirit unleashed like the primal forces that transfixed his visual imagination.

That's the premise of the de Young Museum's "J.M.W. Turner: Painting Set Free," an exciting, exceedingly pleasurable summer exhibition that focuses on this final artistic chapter. It includes oil paintings and sublime translucent watercolors along with some padding - a dozen unfinished, large-scale canvases that lack the subtle differentiations in light, and shapes morphing in fog or glare, etc., that distinguish much of his best work - at the conclusion of what is an otherwise excellent show.

According to FAMSF's departing director Colin Bailey, the portrait of the ornery aging artist in "Mr. Turner," Mike Leigh's exhaustively researched biopic, was spot-on. The film presented Turner as an uncouth, rude, grunting eccentric lacking in social skills; nonetheless, his talent was recognized and rewarded early, and he gained almost immediate acceptance.

A celebrity in his day and successful enough to pursue his bliss, he was also a polarizing, controversial figure who broke with tradition and offered the shock of the new. For that sin, he was castigated by some critics as too radical - he was once dubbed "The Overturner" - while his audacity was championed by others.

Indeed, some of his works have the "savage grandeur" and shake, rattle, and roll of a special-effects light extravaganza, albeit with considerably more finesse. Take "Snow Storm - Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth making Signals in Shallow Water, and going by the Lead. The Author was in this Storm on the Night the Ariel left Harwich" (1842), a maritime masterpiece with a wordy title that reads like a movie script. That's fitting because the painting is gloriously alive and as grippingly cinematic as a scene from an action film. A ship is tossed about as if it were a toy in the burly grey arms of a tumultuous ocean, sucked into a vortex of storm waves and weather as a plume of brown smoke reaches down from the snow-wracked heavens like the hand of the angry Almighty. It was dismissed by some as "Soapsuds and Whitewash." Ahead of his time and wise to the value of shrewd marketing, he promoted an apocryphal story that the sailors lashed him to the mast during the storm, thereby lending the painting authenticity.

Turner was rarely without a sketchbook full of pencil drawings that were the basis for many of his paintings. Pad in hand, he headed out one evening to witness a roaring conflagration on the Thames later captured in "The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16th October 1834." The work also illustrates his alertness to architectural detail - as a young man he was employed as a draughtsman - that appears in some of his 19 paintings of Venice. Among them are two watercolors created circa 1840: "Turner's Bedroom in the Palazzo Giustinian (the Hotel Europa)," with a view of the Piazza Saint Marco, and the heavenly romantic "Venice: Santa Maria della Salute, Night Scene with Rockets," in which fireworks punctuate an azure sky fading to Midnight blue. For someone enraptured with the spiritual properties of light, Turner's night scenes are some of his most exquisite.
J.M.W. Turner's "Peace - Burial at Sea," part of the exhibition J.M.W. Turner: Painting Set Free, now at the de Young Museum. Photo: Rick Gerharter

Turner's preoccupation with the interplay of light, sea and sky led some to regard his work as a prelude to Impressionism - Monet is said to have studied his techniques - and yielded exquisite watercolors such as "Rain Clouds" (c. 1845), where a twist of bluish vapor is suspended over the ocean and a sandy beach; and the heartbreakingly lovely "Fishermen on the Lagoon, Moonlight" (1840), a hymn to evanescent moon glow. At a higher altitude, cold light and the dawn chill of "The Blue Rigi, Sunrise" (1842) ensconce an alpine peak hovering like a mirage over a lake.

A dance of elements wedded to a poetic vision takes a somber turn in the elegiac "Peace - Burial at Sea" (1842), an homage to Turner's friend and former rival Sir David Wilkie, who succumbed to typhoid aboard ship; due to fears of contagion, the vessel was forced to anchor off the coast of Gibraltar. A study in high-contrast lighting and color, the nocturnal charcoal blacks of this square canvas shadow a ship with its sails in silhouette; a shaft of incandescence illuminates the bow, and a celestial white, an effect achieved through triple layers of lead white, chalk and oil primers, pierces the distance.

"War. The Exile and the Rocket Limpet," a companion piece painted the same year, portrays a fantasy Napoleon who died in exile on St. Helena Island. The imperious general, a solitary figure in the bloody dawn, stands with arms crossed on the edge of a pond, its grassy banks reddened with sacrifices of the fallen, the water tinged with human effluence and crimson.

"J.M.W. Turner: Painting Set Free" runs through Sept. 20 at the de Young Museum. A related exhibition, Luminous Worlds: British Works on Paper, 1770 -1870, which opens at the Legion of Honor on July 11, includes drawings, sketches and watercolors by Turner and his cohorts