Turner

Fülszöveg

7l
URNER
Jean Selz
Joseph Mallard William Turner is often acknowledged as the greatest English landscape painter in the most important pictorial revolution of the nineteenth century. No one can be regarded as a more obvious forerunner of Impressionism than Turner. But the most surprising thing about him is not that, forty years before Claude Monet, he discovered the means of expressing the way forms dissolve in light; this discovery was radically opposed to his own work—the work of more than forty years—that is, seeking to perfect his work within the Romantic-Classical aesthetic whose ideal exponent, in his eyes, was Claude Lorrain. However, Turner broke with his earlier ideas, and his work therefore falls into two distinct phases which present a juxtaposition of styles that summarize, in a manner unique in the history of painting, the transition from the classical to the modern period.
The more-or-less complete disappearance of drawing in the watercolors of his last period,... Tovább

Fülszöveg

7l
URNER
Jean Selz
Joseph Mallard William Turner is often acknowledged as the greatest English landscape painter in the most important pictorial revolution of the nineteenth century. No one can be regarded as a more obvious forerunner of Impressionism than Turner. But the most surprising thing about him is not that, forty years before Claude Monet, he discovered the means of expressing the way forms dissolve in light; this discovery was radically opposed to his own work—the work of more than forty years—that is, seeking to perfect his work within the Romantic-Classical aesthetic whose ideal exponent, in his eyes, was Claude Lorrain. However, Turner broke with his earlier ideas, and his work therefore falls into two distinct phases which present a juxtaposition of styles that summarize, in a manner unique in the history of painting, the transition from the classical to the modern period.
The more-or-less complete disappearance of drawing in the watercolors of his last period, in which the "Tachism," or action painting, comes close to abstraction, is all the more striking in that Turner, who taught perspective at the Royal Academy for many years, had long shown a predilection for architecture —cathedrals and castles —which he liked to portray with the topographical accuracy of an Italian "vedute" painter.
The story of this London barber's son who became a painter of genius is a mine of precious information on the development of the artist's exceptional personality, his ambitions, his determination, the contradictions in his character, and his extraordinary capacity for work. Jean Selz studied the 20,000 drawings and watercolors by Turner in the British Museum and examines the multifarious aspects of Turner's life and work in this book. Vissza