Force of nature

AS we look to artists to be seers and saviors, bringing back reports from the frontiers of experience, we tend to thrive on the mythologies that are created around them, or, more often than not, that they create around themselves. And as the best of art conveys not simply a heightened emotional state but a wholly new way of experiencing those emotions, we maybe need to acknowledge our artist heroes as legendary pioneers -- clearing land against the odds with the keen, indefatigable edge of their extraordinary acuity. The life, we feel, must answer for the temper of the work.

As such, the visual arts present a wealth of biographical mythology, from, for instance, Vincent Van Gogh’s madness to Jackson Pollock’s alcoholism (two examples that have lent themselves so well to film, in Kirk Douglas’ febrile portrayal of the former and, more recently, Ed Harris’ astonishing performance as the latter). Both stories deal with newness -- how innovation tends to ride a perilous back curve, in terms of its reception, between critical indifference and cultural enshrinement. And both stories raise the question of whether artists can ever think in terms of success. Are their acts of translation ever complete? Or would this, as Graham Greene once wrote, be rather like a priest trying to think in terms of success?

If Pollock and Van Gogh represent evolutionary stages in the development of not just modern art but the modern artist as a mythologized cultural archetype, then both must take their place as the descendants of Joseph Mallord William Turner, the English painter of light and landscape who seems to inaugurate modern art in much the same way that Gustave Flaubert might be argued to originate the modern novel. Between 1790 and 1840, Turner advanced the entire potential of art -- how art might be made and what art might achieve -- and his standing in this regard is every bit as cataclysmic as his most dramatic paintings. The translation into art of his deeply felt experience appears seamless and complete; his brilliance comes across as literally elemental, as though his skills as an artist are as much a monolithic force of nature as the weather and the landscape they so often depicted.

As described by James Hamilton’s richly detailed biography, Turner’s life combined the canny entrepreneurial spirit of any businessperson promoting a brand within a cut-throat market and a profound engagement with the sheer physical labor of his craft. With this in mind, Hamilton’s opening quotation from Turner, “The only secret I have got is damned hard work,” is in some ways the ultimate refinement of his subject’s story -- like Warhol’s pronouncement that all there is to know about him can be found on the surface of his paintings.

Turner’s modernity as an artist -- he would dress the part, for instance, to impress his patrons and opened his own gallery as soon as he could afford to do so -- can be seen to coincide with the beginnings of what we might recognize as contemporary urban culture. Born in Covent Garden, London, in 1775, Turner grew up with a city that was beginning to accelerate; buildings and professions, institutions and intrigues were caught up in a collective process of expansion at a time when scientific, intellectual and constitutional debate were also pursuing new ideas. Art, however, remained a matter of training and patronage, with an accepted career structure based on the Royal Academy, its schools, exhibitions and distinguished members.

Hamilton tracks the speed with which Turner grew from making drawings in his father’s barbershop (always a useful venue for gossip and contacts) to achieving a firm reputation as a young artist of extraordinary promise. The single-mindedness with which Turner pursued his career -- making very good money from commissioned work by the time he was in his early 20s -- keeps pace with the development of his genius, and Hamilton possesses a remarkable ability to identify those works or occasions which seem to define this quality of human capability that is so resistant to description or analysis. Hamilton allows genius to describe itself through implication, as in this passage relating to Turner’s teenage years:

“Sitting at the top of Cook’s Folly, aged sixteen, Turner was looking out at the most dramatic view he had yet experienced. Though Brentford may have been a kind of paradise and the sea in the bay at Margate might have been whipped up into good, fulsome storms while he was there, only the Avon Gorge in the September light gave him height, depth, distance, and crystal clarity all at once. He had coloured miscellaneous engravings of picturesque views in an antiquarian volume while he was living at Brentford, but his 1791 Bristol drawings were his first expression of the experience from a high point of the motion of the engine of the air.”

This last phrase, “the motion of the engine of the air,” seems to complete Hamilton’s paragraph with just enough poetic effect to denote Turner’s superhuman ability to translate into art his experience of the Sublime. It has been fashionable in recent years to attempt to dismantle notions of artistic genius, preferring the tactics of deconstruction to a critical language that acknowledges issues of deep subjectivity. In this much, Hamilton maintains a steady course between academic respectability and an allowance for the drama and poignancy so clearly central to an accurate portrait of his subject. Indeed, he begins and ends his book with factual descriptions of the weather at the time of Turner’s birth and death, allowing the accounts of sudden sunshine -- an effect so beloved of the artist -- to carry the emotional weight of the scenes with ease and economy.

But Hamilton never allows a biographer’s empathy to dampen the crisp detailing of his narrative and, to this end, makes good use of written accounts contemporary to Turner, many of which foreground the artist’s unusual intensity, when working, as set against his almost truculent straightforwardness in his daily dealings. What emerges might be taken as the model for the response to the perceived audacities of contemporary art. For instance, in this description from 1811, attributed to the critic Robert Hunt, we read what might so easily be an account of public reaction to the maturing abstraction of Pollock:

Turner’s “ ‘Whirlwind in the Desert’ astounded the connoisseurs, who after contemplating at proper distance an embodied violence of atmosphere that seemed to take away one’s senses, found themselves, when they came near, utterly at a loss what to make of it, and as it were smothered in the attempt.”

The subsequent, unvarying pattern of Turner’s life has all the routine -- a love of order, almost -- so frequently favored by artists, as though to counterbalance the often vertiginous turbulence of their creativity. His traveling in Britain and the Continent would be constant, sketching and painting wherever he went; he then appears to be earthed by his lifelong adherence to the rituals, events and institution of the Royal Academy, demonstrating the need for uncomplicated, uncomplaining constancy that he also required from his domestic arrangements. There is an almost brutal directness in Turner’s relation to his family: His mother, having always suffered from fits of violent temper, was pronounced incurably insane and died in Bedlam hospital, abandoned by both her husband and her son. Turner’s father became his assistant, carrying out a heavy workload of errands and menial work for his wealthy son, long into his old age.

In tracking Turner’s gathering fame, and the switchback of critical opinion that would take him in and out of fashion, Hamilton sheds light on the ways in which a cult can build around artists, thickening the delicate strands of their identity into something more lumpenly recognizable as a national institution. The critic, artist and prototype eco-warrior John Ruskin would be largely responsible for the mainstreaming of Turner’s accomplishments into the broader currents of contemporary taste. But there would also be that depressingly English reaction to progressive art or the avant-garde: ridicule -- regarded in England as a means of controlling difference or otherness. The satirical magazine Punch, begun in 1841, would commence its career of recycling old jokes by describing Turner’s paintings in culinary terms -- a witticism that would also catch on in the theaters, where in comic scenes a dropped tray of cakes and tarts would be swiftly rearranged and sold to an unsuspecting “connoisseur” as a work by Turner.

Through Turner’s eventual fame and old age, Hamilton identifies that collision of contradictory elements that seems so often to exist in the lives of great artists: that the public man might be wearing a mask but wearing yet another in private. As he writes of Turner’s final years, the artist seems poised in some middle state between derelict infirmity and premature immortality: “Opposing forces in Turner’s character impelled him both to show intense anger if anybody tried to help him even with the most minor repairs to his paintings and to show a pathetic attitude of fatalism, which led him to allow his house, his gallery, and his great pictures to fall into rack and ruin. A contemporary described the house as having from the outside the appearance of a place in which some great crime had been committed.”

Turner’s real life, as Hamilton’s biography makes clear, took place on canvas and in sketch books; the rest was merely the support system that allowed him to make his art -- his lifelong task of translation -- undistracted by common concerns. And in this self-cherishing sense, perhaps, genius -- that “damned hard work” -- touches on some kind of crime.