Good evening and welcome to Got a Happy Story?
Got a Happy Story is a community gathering every Friday night where we share stories large and small that have put a smile on our face. It is a time to acknowledge the joy and wonder we experience. The Happy Story diary exists as a way to anchor the community in hope and comfort while we do the hard work of taking back our country. Everyone and all sorts of stories and pictures are welcome. May we find joy and strength here.
Tonight my happy story covers my best day in the past two weeks, a day at the museum. Days at the museum were once part of my regular routine but now I have become a typical New Yorker "It's the last day of the big show. Now I've got to go."
On the last day of summer I spent the entire day in the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the final day of J.M.W. Turner. What a fabulous day it was.
I just have to write a story about J.M.W. Turner's art. I'm not sure what to write because I'm no art historian but I love those paintings. My obsession with the sun rising from and setting behind the horizon is nothing new. The photos are new but the relaxation of watching the softer side of the sun goes back a long way for me. I feel like some of this man's paintings gave me my visual wings.
Isn't art wonderful? All of the arts are a touchstone of of the goodness in civilization. The harmonious nature of music, painting, literature and the preforming arts have probably done more than any other force to bring about peace and harmony in this world.
I have always had a strong relationship with the visual arts. In the past twenty years I tried to play catch up and learn more about the artist and the people they were presenting their art to. I guess because I just needed no convincing as far as Joseph Mallord William Turner, I never learned much about him. Just one look and I'm sold;
I was not unfamiliar with Turner. I have been lucky to visit London seven times in my life and once I was able to tear myself away from The Execution of Lady Jane Grey I fell madly in love with Turner's views of the world.
I knew most of the things you hear on gallery talks. The fact that he was a successful artist and attended the Royal Academy of Arts when he was only fourteen. That he was accepted into the Academy one year later in 1796 and that year the Royal Academy exhibited his first work.
I knew that his style is said to have laid the foundation for Impressionism and that he was considered to have played a very important role in elevating the landscape painting.
I always thought that Turner was the most emotion invoking artist who ever lived and knew that throughout his life, J. M. W. Turner was a controversial painter.
The reasons for both the sanctification and the denunciation were more or less the same: Turner’s preference for poetic atmospherics over narrative clarity, his infatuation with the operation of light rather than with the objects it illuminated. His love affair with gauzy obscurity, his resistance to customary definitions of contour and line, his shameless rejoicing in the mucky density of oils or in the wayward leaks and bleeds of watercolors—these were condemned as reprehensible self-indulgence. Sir George Beaumont, collector, patron, and, as he supposed, arbiter of British taste, complained noisily of Turner’s "vicious practice" and dismissed his handling of the paint surface as "comparatively, blots." The caustic essayist William Hazlitt was especially troubled by Turner’s relish of visual ambiguity: the sharp line melting into the swimming ether. Contrary to Ruskin, Hazlitt thought it was unseemly for Turner to fancy himself playing God, reprising the primordial flux of Creation. Someone, Hazlitt commented, had said that his landscapes "were pictures of nothing and very like."
But that is precisely what we do like, do we not? Turner’s art of conjuring something from nothing, and then (unlike God) having the temerity to deposit the working trace of that mysterious process on the canvas, has made him a paragon for modernists. He seems to have understood picturing as a collaborative process between the artist’s hand and the beholder’s eye, in which the former laid down suggestive elements and the imaginative observer assembled them in his mind to make a coherent subject. Sometimes he would help the process along, sometimes not. But he was much taken by the indeterminacy of the exercise, by forms that escaped resolution. The sobriety of the hard edge became, one has to think, a sign of conceptual banality, a weakness in the mind’s eye. For him the purest form, and one that he repeatedly returned to, was also the most naturally unstable: the rainbow.
Just like the great Impressionist that followed, he managed to piss off many art critics. After reading the New York Times review, it seems he still has that going for him;
This show may be wearying because there is something imperious and impersonal about the sheer force of Turner’s ambition. It is almost as if his drive to capture nature or history in motion was so intense that it didn’t leave room for anyone else, including the viewer. Maybe that’s why despite all his hard work and even the majesty of his vision, you can emerge from this exhibition impressed but oddly untouched, even chilled.
I could not disagree more and felt like I was right inside the paintings of this man who I would learn from the audio guide was in fact overly ambitious through his life but was also an influential poet, philosopher and was very active in influencing the politics of his day. He was a progressive in his time.
In the first gallery I came upon Snow Storm, Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps;
According to the Tate this 1805 painting "exemplifies Turner’s achievement in the Sublime" and invited "a contemporary parallel, between Hannibal and Napoleon, who had crossed the Alps to invade Italy in 1797." Britain and France were at war when the painting was made.
I had seen it before but noticed for the first time that it was an antiwar painting. The people in the foreground are scavengers pillaging the fallen fighters detailed brutal hand to hand combat can be seen on the right. But what really blew me away was all the way in the background almost so you wouldn't notice is on of Hannibal's 37 war elephants. In the sunlight there is a tiny little elephant with it's trunk raised in victory.
In the next gallery, two more paintings of a contemporary war. The first The Battle of Trafalgar, as Seen from the Mizen Starboard Shrouds of the Victory, has more that a few historical inaccuracies but the sniper in the crows nest in the ship on the right and Admiral Nelson dying on the deck of the Trafalgar really bring on both patriotism and horror;
The second also The Battle of Trafalgar was a Royal commission. The work was ordered by King George IV to hang in St James's Palace and was Turner's largest painting of his life but also the main focus is many sailors dying or trying to save others in the foreground;
Although Slavery was already abolished in Great Britain Turner spent much energy protesting the trade continuing in other nations. First the horror of The Slave Ship;
From The Slave Ship wiki link;
The subject of the painting is the practice of 18th century slave traders who would throw the dead and dying human 'cargo' overboard during the middle passage in the Atlantic Ocean in order that they might claim the insurance for 'drowning'. Turner was inspired by lines from James Thomson's The Seasons:
Increasing still the Terrors of these Storms,
His Jaws horrific arm'd with threefold Fate,
Here dwells the direful Shark. Lur'd by the Scent
Of steaming Crrouds, of rank Disease, and Death,
Behold! he rushing cuts the briny Flood,
Swift as the Gale can bear the Ship along;
And, from the Partners of the cruel Trade,
Which spoils unhappy Guinea of her Sons,
Demands his share of Prey, demands themselves.
The stormy Fate descend: one Death involves
Tyrants and Slaves; when strait, their mangled Limbs
Crashing at once, he dyes the purple Seas
With Gore, and riots in the Venegeful Meal.
'Summer', ll.1013-25
Then another tragic news item of his day. In Disaster at Sea" (also known as "The Wreck of the Amphitrite")where many women convicts preished at sea;
Loss of the Amphitrite
Come all you gallant Englishmen who ramble at your ease,
While I do unfold the horrors and dangers of the seas;
It's of a ship, the Amphitrite, with a hundred and eight females,
And children, crew and cargo, bound for New South Wales.
The Amphitrite convict ship sailed for New South Wales from Woolwich on August 25 1833 carrying 108 female convicts, 12 children, and a crew of 16. She ran aground near Boulogne and as the Captain refused assistance, only three sailors survived. In Australia's transportation history only five convict transports were lost with a total death toll of 602 convicts and their children.
"The female convicts who were battened down under the hatches, on the vessel running aground, broke away the half deck hatch, and frantic, rushed on the deck. Of course they entreated the captain and surgeon to let them get ashore in the long-boat, but they were not listened to, as the captain and surgeon did not feel themselves authorised to liberate prisoners committed to their care.
About seven o'clock the flood tide began. The crew, seeing that there were no hopes, clung to the rigging. The poor 108 women and 12 children remained on deck, uttering the most piteous cries. The vessel was about three quarters of a mile from shore, and no more. Owen, one of the men saved, thinks that the women remained on deck in this state about an hour and a half! "
I was also familiar with many of Turner's paintings of Venice in the style of Canaletto. From the audio guide I learned that Turner thought Venice a dead society, living off their past wealth, The Grand Canal;
And displayed his homeland as industrious as in Shields, on the River Tyne;
The use of a blinding sun to present an emotion. In the The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire from 1817, Turner showed the empire in it's last light. Here they win their last battle and Roman soldiers are boarding ships to slavery for a very short time;
And here inRegulus, to remember Marcus Atilius Regulus who supposedly had his eyelids cut off in Carthage before he was executed by being placed in a spiked barrel and rolled down a hill, Turner blinds the viewer;
It was the end of the show that really blew me away. The paintings from later in his life that left me asking "Father of impressionism? More like the father of abstract expressionism." I mean nobody ever saw what this man saw. He did see The Burning of the House of Lords;
But these two that Turner painted in his sixties left me breathless.
In the first one Snow Storm—Steam Boat off a Harbor's Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water, and Going by the Lead he was actually at sea in this squall and did not think he would make it back to shore;
The second he paid homage to one of his contemporaries (I can't remember whom)with this, Peace — Burial at Sea. Perhaps the mallard in the foreground was a self reflection. His middle name was Mallard;
And in the final gallery, an unfinished work called Norham Castle that may just have influenced Picasso;
Talk about being ahead of your time!
Well that's my happy story. A bit of a strange topic for Got a Happy Story and I wish I had more time to dedicate to this day in my life because it was amazing. I will say that the last the paintings made me cry. Tears of joy. It just seemed that I was looking at the beauty of peoplekind.
How about you, do you have a happy story?