William Turner (1775-1851): to want to write about it, retracing the essential lines of his overwhelming expressive path, especially now, on the day of his 249th birthday, we don’t know where to start. The visual and emotional stimuli that his painting provokes, in fact, blend together and, without changing the internal substance, highlight the elusiveness of a artist considered an irreplaceable pivot of pictorial Romanticism. With him the impossibility of conveying through words what we are looking at seems to be an essential and obligatory precondition, so as to relive, not only as observers, the same sense of bewilderment towards a nature indicated as the primary source of every thought . A nature marked by reassuring rhythms, but which can be intimidating and destructive, intimate and majestic, sweet and aggressive. Turner not only wants us with him: in his paintings he seems to want to drag us inside. Not surprisingly, when in 1812 he presented the large and impressive canvas entitled “Blizzard: Hannibal and his army cross the Alps”wanted to place it in an unusually low position, precisely to give the visitor the opportunity to cross the threshold.
A historical subject, far from the waves of its seas and partly binding. Even in this case, however, little remains of the story and the celebratory emphasis of the neoclassical painters of those same years is completely absent. Hannibal does not appear, while the small and desperate silhouettes of some soldiers can be glimpsed, called to punctuate horizontally at the bottom of the large canvas (145×246), created in 1812 and now visible on the walls of the Tate Gallery in London. Looking carefully, having risen to the surface from who knows where, there is also, still small and lying on its side, one of the 37 elephants of the famous expedition. But the true protagonist, called to fully convey the dramatic intensity of the event, is the raging sky: placed high up, the round sun lacks shine, the snow lacks whiteness. The force of nature, therefore, once again causes dismay and admiration, reducing everything else.
Even in the absence of drama, Turner, of the landscape, wanted to capture the less accessible perspectives, in order to establish a dialogue with the subject that was both private and subsequently shareable.. This happened above all during his numerous travels, stopping enchanted in front of a crevasse or climbing at night to the roof of the Hotel Europa in Venice, so as to capture the moonlit city from above, keeping Canaletto in his heart. He came to Italy three times, attracted by the charm of a landscape also made of history and marked by the corrosive action of time.
To understand the extraordinary breadth of his artistic journey, let’s imagine William Turner with his arms outstretched: we will see him with one hand, if not actually touching, getting very close to Canaletto (who died only seven years before his birth), an artist who he had the opportunity to look carefully at his beginnings also thanks to the numerous paintings created on English soil during the almost ten years in which the Venetian painter, having left the lagoon, stayed there, starting from 1746; while, with the other hand, he seems to almost come into contact with impressionist painting. Indeed, looking at his latest paintings, he even surpasses his expressive achievements, so as to continue on his own the path opened by the elderly Monet, pushing forward in the direction of Informal art, with even more courageous stylistic intuitions and ventures. . Monet himself, shaken, struggled to grasp the extent of it: “In the past I loved Turner very much, today I love him much less. Why? He didn’t draw enough color and put in too much. I studied it well.”
In fact, if in the work of the French painter the subject, in all its forms – including the aquatic and fragile water lilies – visually regroups after having undergone the flaking action of the light, in Turner, that same light invades the surface of the canvas as had come out of a sudden vent. A sort of safety valve. The light is perhaps the same in intensity, but here it seems different in terms of origin and “consistency”. Certainly, it didn’t rain down from above, but rather leaked from an internal reservoir that could no longer contain it. Turner’s, in short, is a sort of emotional overflow. A luminous and bituminous “flood”, capable of overwhelming every visual reference in its passage, so as to transform, along the way, the material into a subject. Here because in Turner, light becomes matter and, no less, matter becomes light.
Tags: force nature dismay admiration diminishing Journey works William Turner
