J. M. W. Turner [antikvár]

Observation - a method of approach "If the totality of colour is presented to the eye from the outside in the form of an object, it will be pleasing to the eye, because it thereby encounters the sum of its own activity as reality." Turner's marginal comment: "-this is the object ofPaintg [painting]". (Goethe, Theory of Colours, §808, HA, vol. 13, p. 502) J.M.W.Turner is numbered among those artists granted a long period of creativity. He worked tirelessly for over sixty years; his estate alone embraced more than 19,000 drawings and colour sketches, while the range of his output, covers a broad span. It is only with difficulty that we can identify the pages produced by the young artist around 1790 - the closing years ofthe Rococo - as the work ofthe artist from whom would come the brilliant, free weaving of colour found in the pictures painted in the 1840s. Not until his later works did he find a style of painting all his own, a vision of nature hitherto impossible. Even today, his later pictures can give the observer a sense of seeing the worid for the first time - a world of colour and light. As early as 1843, John Ruskin, the most influential British art critic ofRomanti-cism and the first passionate defender of Turner's painting, expressed the opinion in his "Modem Painters" that Turner's pictures enabled one to see the world in a new way: "The whole effect of painting from the technical viewpoint is based on our ability to acquire once again that state which one could call the innocence of the eye, in other words a way of looking at things in a childlike manner, through which one perceives spots of colour as such without knowledge of their meaning - as a blind man would see them if his sight were restored all of a sudden".' Yet it is this power to change our vision that renders Turner's painting a puzzle even today. This applies not only to the dating of his works ~ which is especially difficult in a number of cases - or to the efforts of art historians to place his pictures' motifs within the context of the artistic development ofthe first half of the 19th century. "I did not paint it to be understood," Tumer objected, following scathing criticism of one of his later, significant pictures, "but I wished to show what such a scene was like".^ His later painting was intended exclusively for the eye. The possibilities of vision offer not only particular access through the act of observation to the depictive quality of nature but also, equally, fresh access to the nature ofthe picture. The highly persuasive quality of his art appears substantiated precisely by the impossibility of separating the one from the other. His painting defines anew the relationship of nature and art. Extensive research has been conducted into Turner's life, enabling the wealth of his creative output to be placed in perspective. The question remains, however, as to how he developed a style of painting through which both nature and art could reveal themselves in a new way. A conscious understanding of the complex effect produced by Turner's pictures requires one to take into consideration a multitude of factors. This effect is anything but a matter of course. It presupposes a complex interaction of creative possibilities in art, something which he achieved through various means in the course of his creative activity. His later pictures are intended purely for the eye, and their comprehension depends on a conscious understanding ofthe manner in which they disclose themselves to the eye. It is thus necessary to examine the creative elements interacting here, to take notice of their effect upon the observer.