by John Updike
The nineteenth century—the Romantic century—sought to save God by empowering inwardness. Figures as disparate as Kierkegaard and Emerson strove to turn the tables on the creeping atheism of empirical science by making the Subjective a player in the game equal to the Objective. Things are composed of our perceptions; reality must include our intuitions. Friedrich’s landscapes usually exist in two planes: a dark foreground, the realm of the viewer, and a luminous background, the natural realm that is viewed. The actual substance of what is seen is not at issue. Is the misty city the young couple of On the Sailboat gazes toward really there, or is it a hopeful vision? Friedrich’s favorite dramatic device, the foreground Rückenfigur (“back figure,” figure seen from behind), inserts the act of viewing into the picture, and weaves mood and reflection into the natural reality. In Memory of the Riesengebirge, based in 1835 upon a sketch the artist made twenty-five years before, moves back, as if in Wordsworthian memory, from a rocky dark-brown foreground to the radiant whiteness of the Schneekoppe, a presiding purity that one can hardly avoid associating with God. A glance around the single room where most of the Russian pictures are hung reveals that all have a glow; even the nocturnal cityscape, Sisters on the Harbor-View Terrace (c. 1820), has a luminous sky, glowing as if with the foggy diffusion of city lights. In the case of the twilit, time-darkened small oil called The Nets (c. 1830–35), there is almost nothing to see but the glow. Moravian theology spoke of faith as not in the head “but in the heart, a light illuminated in the heart.” Light is the commonest metaphor for divinity, and Friedrich’s skies, which often take up more than half of his picture space, show an especial tropism toward the realm of the glowing impalpable. His skies are rarely distinctly blue, as if this color would opacify their luminosity. In a watercolor like Ruins of Eldena Monastery (1801) as well as such oils as Moonrise by the Sea and On the Sailboat, Friedrich gives the sky an anatomy as detailed as the land’s; his even focus leaves nothing scrubbed in or casually observed above the horizon. Goethe, noticing this propensity, once suggested that he execute a series of cloud studies based upon the meteorological system recently developed by the British natural historian Luke Howard. Friedrich refused, according to Koerner, “because it would empty nature of any ‘higher’ meaning, and because the very attempt to classify would violate the essential obscurity of clouds, and with it the radical alterity of nature itself.” Yet his paintings do contain identifiable cloud types, so closely did he paint them.
Friedrich, On the Sailboat, 1818–19. Oil on canvas. (Photo Credit Ill.10)
God is in the details as well as the receding prospect. Friedrich’s early pen drawings of ruins and plants show a student’s careful precision, which he never relaxed. His explorations of branch patterns and rock shapes keep that Renaissance sense, exemplified by Dürer and Leonardo, of microcosmic discovery. He did not draw easily, and his human forms have little anatomy, yet drawing is everywhere in his pictures, pulling them tight—for instance, the beautifully airy sepia Boat on the Beach by Moonlight, with its gentle diagonal echoed by the elongated cirrus clouds, and Coffin on a Grave (c. 1836), its foreground thistle as momentous as its silhouetted birch bizarrely hung with funeral wreaths. Even his far-off trees, like those seen in the exquisite Window with a View of a Park, have the leaf-by-leaf quality of medieval illumination. Precise rendering is the ethical tool that unlocks each thing’s Eigentümlichkeit—a term favored by Romantic theorists and the theologian Schleiermacher, signifying “peculiarity” in both its English senses, of particularity and strangeness. For Friedrich’s owls and crooked, grasping oaks are strange, even sinister. The Gothic was the cradle of the Romantic. Among his eeriest, most original canvases are renderings, with no anecdotal or symbolic indications, of isolated thickets of trees, as if the most random piece of nature, bodied forth with enough attention to each thrusting twig, has a message for us.
Not that his precision is heavy-handed or spectacular; the two big mountainscapes on display, with their rising valley fogs, have a certain recessive fuzziness. Friedrich’s color, save for the fruity tints of his sunrises and sunsets, is brownish and rather streaky. The marvel of the small Swans in the Reeds by Dawn’s Early Light lies not so much in the pink sky and the animated wealth of reed leaves as in the capture, in these leaves’ dull green and the white swans’ flat gray, of light before the sun has dawned. Generations before Monet, he has succeeded in painting the air that intervenes before the eye. Yet his appeal is not basically sensual, or a matter of paint; his method of repeated thin coats overlaid by a glistening varnish minimizes a sense of brushstrokes. We are conscious of the painter mostly as the viewer of what we now see, a fellow-contemplative, waiting like us for a clearer meaning or mood to emerge from the enigmatic vista with its ghost of a design. Friedrich expressed his theories sparely, but another artist of the time reported him as saying in conversation that “the most important thing about a work of art is that it should have an effect on each person who looks at it.”
With the afterimage of these twenty works fresh in my mind’s eye, I made my way through the Metropolitan Museum’s mazy treasure house to the American landscape painters of the nineteenth century, who share much with Friedrich. These men, too, had a transcendentalist, nationalist bent, and hoped to distill from vastness an inspiring Eigentümlichkeit. Thomas Doughty also gives us mountain views and foreground rocks, and Frederic Edwin Church lavishly provides, in his Heart of the Andes (1859), a panorama climaxed by a snowy peak. But their canvases, bigger than any of Friedrich’s, seem clangorously crowded, bright, and busy; Church’s stupendous virtuosity, which throngs the foreground with botanically accurate Andean vegetation and throws a spotlight upon his name carved on a tree trunk, is itself a presence, full of braggadocio. We meekly bend to admire the dashing precision of each detail of the little religious vignette conveniently illuminated; we are in the hands of a showman God. Even where a softer temperament approximates Friedrich’s expectant simplicity—as in Sanford Robinson Gifford’s golden gorge, for instance, with its almost invisible waterfall, and the luminist Martin Johnson Heade’s level quiet marshland—we are in a material world, where the vigorous act of painting suppresses hints of symbolization, of sublimated appearance, of double meaning. John Frederick Kensett renders space and the mood of the sky, but all of a certain moment; he has come to the verge of Impressionism, where the painter, no longer a wistful, yearning Rückenfigur, turns to face us with his brushes, his dancing colors. An irresistible materiality infuses the American landscapes, washing away those faint aftertraces of Christian faith, that delicate fog of the spirit, still visible in Friedrich’s church of Nature.
Splendid Lies
J. M. W. TURNER, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, July 1–September 21, 2008.
The Turner at the Met is a bear of a show—165 items, mostly oils and watercolors, with a few prints—and the other patrons on the day of my perambulation staggered from the final chamber into the gift shop’s welcoming arms as if after a tussle in a cave. Turner cannot be dismissed, but he cannot quite be embraced, either. Ian Warrell says, in his catalogue essay “J. M. W. Turner and the Pursuit of Fame,” “Few other British artists before, or since, have generated such wildly diverse responses to their work during their lifetimes or have continued to provoke such fervent debate.” His contemporaries did agree that he was personally unprepossessing; one associate admitted that “at first sight Turner gave one the notion of a mean-looking little man,” and another remarked that “this man must be loved for his works; for his person is not striking.” John Constable said after encountering the man, a year older than he and much quicker to achieve success, “I always expected to find him what I did—he is uncouth but has a wonderfull range of mind.” Turner failed to look like a great painter, but no one, certainly no other British landscape artist, aspired to greatness more nakedly, with so uninterrupted a productivity and uninhibited an adventurousness.
In the century and a half since Turner’s deat
h in 1851, evolving taste has reversed the debate over his merits: it is the later, nearly abstract paintings that win our hearts, though contemporary criticism waxed sardonic in their dispraise, and the earlier works that won him wealth and fame—mythologically tinged landscapes and scenic renderings of ships, castles, Alps, and English country homes—repel us with their brownish pomp. They seem so melodramatic, so fusty, so hardworking, so grande galerie, whereas some of the canvases (Europa and the Bull; Norham Castle, Sunrise, both c. 1845), to which his brush condescended with a few cryptic dabbles and golden smears, impress us as thrillingly minimal and airy. When these unsold, never-exhibited portions of the immense Turner Bequest left to the Tate were first put on public view in 1906, one critic exclaimed, “We have never seen Turner before!” Another wrote analytically, “Turner in his latest development, more than any artist who had gone before him, painted not so much the objects he saw as the light which played around them.”
Yet the predilections that make Turner special, and even peculiar, were there from the start. He was the artistically precocious son of a Covent Garden barber and a mother who, after leading her husband “a sad life,” was committed to Bethlehem Hospital for the Insane, popularly called “Bedlam,” in 1800, when she was sixty-one and her only son, known in the household as William, was twenty-five.2 Since the age of twelve he had been turning out architectural drawings and hand-coloring prints for a nearby engraver; some of his early drawings were sold in his father’s shop, “ticketed at prices varying from one shilling to three.” At the age of fourteen, he was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools, which offered free training for artists and was housed five minutes’ walk from his home. Although John Ruskin, Turner’s great champion, thought that “Turner, having suffered under the instruction of the Royal Academy, had to pass nearly thirty years of his life in recovering from the consequences,” the boy’s education fixed his attention upon the Royal Academy as the key to respectability as an English artist; he submitted his work to its annual exhibits, and from 1790, when he was fifteen, his watercolors were accepted for display.
His first oil to be exhibited there—in 1796, when he was just twenty-one—was titled Fishermen at Sea; it hangs in the show at the Met, and is something of a miracle. A full moon hangs in a gap of fragmenting dark clouds; its light is reflected on the water below, where a masted fishing boat, with its crew, tilts on a wave. White edges of moonlit foam, delicate as lace, define an oval of momentarily concave water rendered with an avid fidelity to its mixture of shadow and translucence; this liquid bowl of moonlight and the heave of wave creating it portend Turner’s lifelong obsession, to the point of enraptured obscurity, with light in its ephemeral impressions. Off to the left, dim rocks, and, on the right, a second, shadowy, but solidly anatomized boat and, sunk still more deeply in darkness, a white bird on a bobbing barrel testify to the painter’s early fascination with the imperfectly seen.
His boyhood interest was in architecture, and several large watercolors in the exhibition’s first room impeccably delineate the ruins of Tintern Abbey and the interior of Salisbury Cathedral. His architectural precision, like a fossil tidily preserved in a tumbled geology, persists even into Turner’s most boldly dissolved impressions—for instance, the masts and yards and tipped-up dories of the two Whalers oils (RA 1845 and 1846);3 the little village in the lower left-hand corner of the otherwise hazy watercolor Lake Lucerne (1842); the cathedral architecture deftly sketched into the washes of Eu: The Church of Notre-Dame and St-Laurent, with the Château of Louis-Philippe Beyond (1845); and, with less haste, the water-carved gneiss in The Pass of St Gotthard, Near Faido (1843), commissioned by John Ruskin and polished to perfection for this connoisseur of geology.
Turner, Fishermen at Sea, RA 1796. Oil on canvas. (Photo Credit Ill.11)
The paintings, as the decades and the exhibition rooms unfold, fluctuate; moods of elemental daring alternate with oppressively academic productions. Turner’s uncouth ambition included eclectically outdoing other painters at their game. Not only did Fishermen at Sea emulate, according to the catalogue, the eighteenth-century styles of Claude-Joseph Vernet, Joseph Wright of Derby, and Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, but it led, in five years, to “an ambitious response to Willem Van de Velde the Younger’s Dutch Shipping Offshore in a Rising Gale (c. 1672),” called Dutch Boats in Gale (1801), which was described by Benjamin West, then president of the Royal Academy, as “what Rembrandt thought of but could not do.” The canvas given what must be the longest title on record—The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire—Rome being determined on the Overthrow of Her Hated Rival, demanded from her such Terms as might either force her into War, or ruin her by Compliance: the Enervated Carthaginians, in their Anxiety for Peace, consented to give up even their Arms and their Children (RA 1817)—reflects, according to the catalogue, “the unmistakable style of Claude Lorrain,” especially “Claude’s masterpiece, Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba” (1648). Turner’s determination to consolidate a distinctive British style left few Continental predecessors unassimilated. Unmarried, reclusive, he travelled widely (standard working procedure for painters of the time), and every new territory brought with it the ghosts of rivals to subdue.
Venice evoked, the catalogue states, “well-known paintings by Titian, Tintoretto and especially Canaletto”; Turner’s Venice: The Dogana and San Giorgio Maggiore (RA 1834) “was explicitly couched in the style of Canaletto (even introducing an incidental portrait of the artist at work).” It and its companion, Venice, from the Porch of Madonna della Salute (RA 1835), display a lighter, sunnier, blue-and-white palette rare for Turner, along with an instinctive clarity in delineating the Grand Canal’s palatial shores. By the time of the two Venetian watercolors from 1840 also on view at the Met, his mature touch fudges all but the broadest outlines, and a sunset yellow tinges the smoky atmosphere. Even an early, Poussinesque exercise in the highly valued mode of the historical sublime, The Tenth Plague of Egypt (RA 1802), has idiosyncratic atmospherics: the un-Egyptian city in the middle distance is oddly shadowless and two-dimensional, while nearer to hand an inky cloud swallows the un-Egyptian hillside and seizes all the drama from the God-stricken small figures in the foreground.
The human population in Turner’s large canvases is rarely more than a footnote, a spatter of colored jellybeans at the base of a mountain or a metropolis. He stood aside from the distinguished British tradition of portrait painting, once he had executed the fine youthful self-portrait of 1798–1800. A certain caricatural verve can be noticed in the visual anecdotes of The Northampton Election, 6 December 1830 (c. 1830–31), of Dartmouth Cove, with Sailor’s Wedding (c. 1825), and of View of London from Greenwich (c. 1825), but the boneless and vapid central figures of The Bay of Baiae, with Apollo and the Sibyl (RA 1823) contribute no focus or weight to the sundry elements of this idealization of an Italian bathing spot. “SPLENDIDE MENDAX”—“a splendid lie”—a friend wrote on the frame, and Turner allowed the verdict to stay. The figures in early picturesque works like Fall of the Rhine, Schaffhausen (RA 1806) and Fishmarket on the Sands—Possibly at Hastings (c. 1810) were seriously worked at, but if one takes the opportunity, which the museum has provided, to compare Géricault’s sensational The Raft of the Medusa (1819) with Turner’s boiling, sketchy raftful of victims in Disaster at Sea (c. 1833–35), one appreciates the vastly more intelligible human drama that Géricault staged. In Turner’s tableau the only actor is the furious ocean.
Not only do his human figures in general lack psychological presence, they lack physical mass, such as another celebrant of impersonal force, Winslow Homer, was able to integrate with ocean and atmosphere—for example, the half-drowned belles of Undertow (1886) and the slickered, silhouetted fishermen of The Herring Net (1885). The heroes of some large Turner canvases are curiously difficult to locate; the blinded Cyclops in Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus—Homer’s Odyssey (RA 1829) merges with cliffs and clouds; the dying Nelson in The Battle of Trafalgar, as Seen from the Mizen St
arboard Shrouds of the Victory (1808) is reduced to an easily overlooked dwarf wearing a comical grimace; and I couldn’t find Nelson at all in Turner’s largest painting ever, The Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805 (1823–24), wherein near-naked navvies desperately compete for lifeboat space under a titanic outlay of billowing sails. Turner didn’t see human beings as worth much in the balance of things; of his terrifying The Shipwreck (1805), the catalogue comments, “The almost absurd futility of the figures’ efforts to save themselves in the face of these forces is thus a crucial aspect of the painting’s sublimity.” The viewer encountering Fall of the Rhine, Schaffhausen on its wall at the Met cringes under the torrent of onrushing white water, which seems certain to engulf the colorful little human caravan beneath it.
Slathering on white pigment with a palette knife, working sections of wet canvas with his fingers, Turner early was criticized for (apropos of Fall of the Rhine) “negligence and coarseness” and (in relation to 1827’s mellow Mortlake Terrace, the Seat of William Moffatt, Esq.; Summer’s Evening) the “yellow fever” of his coloring, which a critic likened to the cuisine of a cook with a mania for curry powder. This painting contains, as an added ingredient, the pasted-on silhouette of a black dog; it had begun to peel off by Varnishing Day and had to be re-affixed. On this day, or days, the artists represented in the annual Royal Academy show were given the privilege of adding final touches to paintings already hung on the walls; Turner was notorious for creating a work from near scratch, that is, from one of the unfinished paintings that crammed his studio. His headlong virtuoso performances on these last-minute varnishing days became a semipublic spectacle. One witness recalled him “standing all day” wearing “an old, tall beaver hat, worn rather off his forehead, which added much to his look of a North Sea pilot.… His colours were mostly in powder, and he mixed them with turpentine, sometimes with size, and water, and perhaps even with stale beer.” Another witness, as early as 1803, saw him “spit all over his picture, and, then taking out a box of brown powder [presumably snuff], rubbed it all over the picture.”
