Joseph Mallord William Turner

Sam Smiles

J.M.W. Turner was a fascinating and enigmatic figure. Both astonishingly prolific and extraordinarily innovative, he is widely seen as the greatest British landscape painter of them all, anticipating and surpassing the Impressionists in his dramatic interpretations of the effects of light and colour. The Turner Book goes beyond the usual interpretations of the artist, revealing the extraordinary self-belief and ambition that allowed him to continue steadfastly with his experimentation in the face of hostile critical attack. The book examines in detail key works and the techniques by which Turner realised them and features revealing extracts from his notebooks, travel journals and poetry. Beautifully illustrated with both famous and unknown works and ranging over the entire course of the artist's career, this is the essential guide to Turner's life and work. Sam Smiles is Professor of Art History at the University of Plymouth at Exeter and the author of numerous acclaimed books, including J.M.W. Turner, Two-way Traffic: British Art and Italian Art 1880-1980 and The Image of Antiquity: Ancient Britain and the Romantic Imagination.

Tate Essential Artists Series

The Turner Book

Gordon McMullan

'Late style' is a critical term routinely deployed to characterise the work of selected authors, composers, and creative artists as they enter their last phase of production—often, but not only, in old age. Taken at face value, this terminology merely points to a chronological division in the artist's oeuvre, 'late' being the antonym of 'early' or the third term in the triad 'early-middle-late'. However, almost from its inception, the idea of late style or late work has been freighted with aesthetic associations and expectations that promote it as a special episode in the artist's creative life. Late style is often characterised as the imaginative response made by exceptional talents to the imminence of their death. In their confrontation with death creative artists, critics claim, produce work that is by turns a determination to continue while strength remains, a summation of their life's work and a radical vision of the essence of their craft. And because this creative phenomenon is understood as primarily an existential response to a common fate, so late style is understood as something that transcends the particularities of place, time and medium. Critics seeking to understand late work regularly invoke the examples of Titian, Goethe, and Beethoven as exemplars of what constitutes late work, proposing that something unites the late style of authors, composers, and creative artists who otherwise would not be bracketed together and that lateness per se is a special order of creative work. The essays in this collection resist this position. Ranging across literature, the visual arts, music, and scientific work, the material assembled here looks closely at the material, biographical and other contexts in which the work was produced and seeks both to question the assumptions surrounding late style and to prompt a more critical understanding of the last works of writers, artists and composers.

Essays in art, literature, and music

Late Style and its Discontents

David Blayney Brown

Amy Concannon

When Turner died in 1851, the general view of an artist's late work was one of decline. Indeed, Turner's own painting from 1845 onwards was described as indulgent, eccentric and 'repulsive', and even his devoted champion John Ruskin commented on its 'wholly inferior value'. However, from the early 1900s there was a major reassessment of Turner's later paintings and sketches. Commentators hailed his study of light as a visionary precursor to the ideas of the Impression­ists. This continued into the twentieth century, with curato­rial choices in some museums presenting Turner's late and unfinished work as distinctly modern. Through a number of key themes and studies into his subject matter, technique and personal activities, this new analysis challenges the historical conceptions of Turner's late style. The idea that as an elderly artist Turner was seen as intro­verted and detached by the Victorian art world is set against the fact that his paintings from 1835 were some of the most popular, accessible and intellectual that he created. Mean­while, questioning the notion that Turner's late work articu­lated a conclusive, radical vision that was heedless of public reaction, the texts explore how Turner had a very firm idea of the workings of the art market at that time. Fully illustrated in colour, and with contributions by some of the foremost Turner scholars, this book breaks new ground in the continuing study of the life and legacy of one of art's greatest masters.

Painting Set Free

The EY Exhibition - Late Turner

J. Paul Getty museum (Los Angeles, Calif.).

Tate Britain (Gallery)

Brian Livesley

Fine arts museums (San Francisco, Calif.).

Showcases the artist's later paintings and sheds light on the biographical, cultural, and historical context of their creation as well as on the painter's craft during his twilight years.

J.M.W. Turner

A landmark publication positions Turner as a pioneer in depicting contemporary life in the wake of dizzying changes resulting from industrialization and modernization. This monograph is tied to the first exhibition to highlight Turner's contemporary imagery--the most exceptional and distinctive aspect of his work. Rather than making claims for Turner as a proto-modernist, it explores what constituted modernity during his lifetime and what it meant to be a modern artist. Turner's career spanned the Napoleonic Wars, the rise of the British Empire, the birth of finance capitalism and modern industrialization, as well as political, scientific, and cultural advances that transformed society and shaped the modern world. While historians have long recognized that the industrial and political revolutions of the late eighteenth century inaugurated far-reaching change and modernization, these were often ignored by artists as they did not fit into established categories of pictorial representation. This publication shows Turner updating the language of art and transforming his style and practice to produce revelatory, definitive interpretations of modern subjects.

Turner's Modern World

Stephanie Moser

Envisioning the Past: Archaeology and the Image is a groundbreaking collection of original essays that brings together archaeologists, art historians and anthropologists to provide new perspectives on the construction of knowledge concerning the antiquity of man. Covers a wide variety of time periods and topics, from the Renaissance and the 18th century to the engravings, photography, and virtual realities of today Questions what we can learn from considering the use of images in the past and present that might guide our responsible use of them in the future Available within the prestigious New Interventions in Art History series, published in connection with the Association of Art Historians.

Sam Smiles

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