We spent a really interesting evening yesterday catching up on some TV programmes my wife had recorded. There were two films about J.M.W. Turner, both of them rather old now, but interesting because they presented very different sides of the artist, and contrasting ways of approaching the interpretation of his art. The first was presented by Tim Marlowe and the second by Simon Schama.
One of the interesting things about the contrast between them was the fact that they both built their case around the core of biography, but the impression they each led to was quite different. Marlowe gave a great deal of space to Turner’s childhood and youth (it was indeed a revelation to me to discover how remarkably precocious he was) and to his extensive travels. His was a Turner whose career was anticipated in childhood and realised in the really famous images we all know. Schama had little to say about the youthful Turner, but found the real measure of his stature as an artist in his later work, some of which is really rather neglected. His was a Turner who anticipated Modernism rather than one who epitomised Romanticism. Marlowe’s Turner was the great observer of Nature. Schama gave us a Turner for whom Nature provided imagery through which to reflect on the human condition. Marlowe’s film was very instructive indeed about Turner’s radical technical inventiveness. Schama was much more interested in the ends to which these innovations were put.
We are planning another of our periodic “raids” on London in November, and I wonder whether I might use the occasion to reacquaint myself with Turner.