JMW Turner, Lausanne: Sunset (1841–2)
The largest exhibition devoted to J.M.W. Turner in the US opens today at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Tennessee. JMW Turner: Quest for the Sublime (until 31 May) brings together more than 70 oil paintings, watercolours, sketches and sketchbooks by the British master selected from the Tate’s Turner Bequest.
The exhibition spans works from the 1790s to the 1840s and is organised thematically, first examining the early landscape paintings Turner made while attending the Royal Academy Schools, then showing some of the first impressions Turner made of the mountains, glaciers and lakes of the Swiss Alps. Other sections offer insight into Turner’s artistic process, including sketchbook studies and watercolours at various stages of completion.
“Turner’s work, especially his late works, certainly appeal to contemporary tastes,” says the museum’s chief curator, Marc Scala. “There have been comparisons made between Turner and Rothko and the Abstract Expressionists because his work oftentimes appear to be abstract and reductive, as they are embedded in an incredible flurry of brushstrokes.”
Some highlights of the exhibition include the nebulous painting Peace—Burial at Sea (exhibited 1942)—the artist’s tribute to his friend, the artist David Wilkie—and the misty gouache watercolour Sea and Sky, English Coast (around 1832), a work that demonstrates Turner’s masterful depiction of landscape in terms of pure colour.
The show has been organised in collaboration with the Turner scholar David Blayney Brown, the Tate’s Manton Senior Curator of British Art. Last year, Brown also partnered with the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut to organise a monographic exhibition of Turner’s watercolours, which is on view until 23 February.
