The
Independent Turner Society
Turner
House, 153 Cromwell Road, London SW5 OTQ, Great Britain
Tel
& Fax: 020 7373 5560; Mobile:
07918 916381
selbywhittingham@hotmail.com
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*** Monday, 1
December 2008, 3pm.
Sotheby’s, 34-35 New Bond
St. Visit to see Turner’s Temple of
Jupiter Panellenius (est.$12-16m). There
are also some fairly unknown Turner watercolours on view: three
early ones (Topham church, Essex (Great Totham?), A
Waterfall and Landscape with Durham
Cathedral); The Valley of Washburn
and Leathley Church (ex Fawkes collection; est.
£200-300,000); Vernon on the Seine (ex
Ruskin collection); Givet on the Meuse (est.
£40-60,000) and Schaffhausen on the Rhine (est.
£200-300,000). There will be
four more, mostly early ones (eg View on River Brent) for
sale at Christie’s on 10 December, two of which were sold
at Sotheby’s in 1980. At Sotheby’s
the Old Masters & British Pictures (some by Turner’s
contemporaries) are also on view. Guy
Peppiatt, formerly of Sotheby’s, has the
private view of his exhibition of watercolours at 6 Mason’s Yard,
SW1, 5.30-8.30.
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*** Monday, 1
December 2008.
Tate Britain. Demonstration by the Stuckists
against the follies of the Turner Prize. All day? You are invited to join in,
dressed as clowns or however you feel inspired. www.stuckism.com
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5 December 2008 – 6
February 2009.
Kings Place (the new
“super-lavish” arts centre at Kings Cross www.kingsplace.co.uk )
Albert Irvin – A
Retrospective.
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19 December 2008. 157th
anniversary of Turner’s death.
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15 November 2008 - 2009.
Views of the Channel Coasts. Works
by Turner and Bonington.
Castle Museum, Nottingham.
Then Hull and (in May) Hastings.
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17 November 2008 – March
2009. Turner. Pushkin
Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. Turners from the Tate
(40 oils + 72 works on paper). See my letters to The
Times.
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Wednesday 11 February. National
Gallery, London. 6.30pm. ‘Painting
and Poetry … reflect and heighten each other’s
beauties’ JMW Turner, by Duncan Robinson, Master of
Magdalene College, Cambridge. The Paul Mellon
Lectures, 21 Jan. - 18 Feb. £5/£3.
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27 March 2009. Turner
and Italy. Opens at the National Gallery of
Scotland, Edinburgh, and goes on to Italy and Hungary. 100+
exhibits. “The most important exhibition of
JMW Turner paintings ever to be seen” in Scotland. “The
first to comprehensively chart Turner’s love-affair with
Italy.”
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April 2009. Turner.
Beijing. Continuation of
Tate’s touring Turner exhibition?
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23 April 2009.
234th anniversary of Turner’s birth.
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<!--[if !supportLists]-->2009.
<!--[endif]-->Turner and the Masters. Tate Britain. Turner
and the Old Masters who influenced him.
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Mike Mannix writes from
Yorkshire about his article in the Richmond Journal
arguing that the song The Lass of Richmond Hill refers
to Richmond, Surrey not Yorkshire. That may well be
so. The question for Turnerites, however, is when
the Yorkshire claim to the song was first made – before
Turner’s visit to Richmond, Yorks., in 1816? I
suggest that that is likely. Turner’s links
with the I’Ansons of Yorkshire (and London) I have detailed, but
historians have not yet taken those on board.
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Information about Turner’s
unknown relatives continues to reach me. Last month
I mentioned Professor David Waterhouse, bagpiper extraodinary.
Now I hear that his wife, Naoko Matsubara,
“one of the world’s greatest printmakers”, is having
an exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, from 5 March
2009 and is to receive an Hon.Doctorate at Chatham University.
A reduced version of the show will be at the Craig Scott
Gallery, Toronto, from the autumn. She has works in
the Albertina, British Museum, Fogg etc.etc. Their
son Yoshiki is a successful designer.
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In the November issue of The
Art Newspaper there is a “revelation” by Martin
Bailey, Why the Tate turned down Rothko’s offer of 30
paintings. (The Rothko
exhibition continues at Tate Modern until 1 February). This
is a wordy, confused account telling us little that is new.
Rothko, we are told, in February 1966 (or, some paragraphs
later, February 1967) offered to the Director of the Tate, Norman Reid,
to “donate 30 paintings”. Rothko’s
terms are nowhere stated, but evidently these were, like
Turner’s, that the works should be on permanent view in rooms set
aside for them. The Tate’s trustees,
“worried that they might have to permanently hang all the
works”, decided to accept only nine. To get
round this Reid had written a “masterful” letter to Rothko:
“Only Turner, Picasso and Matisse have a room to
themselves in the Tate. In suggesting that there
should be a Rothko room – where the pictures would be changed
from time to time so that there would be new arrangements like music,
playing a different tune, I had this in mind as the greatest honour we
could offer an artist.” Rothko’s reply
is not given, but he evidently thought Reid’s letter baloney.
The curator was setting himself up here as the artist not the
keeper (a title now significantly dropped, to the regret of former
keeper Dr Martin Butlin). This is just what A.J.Finberg and Robert
Medley objected to in the case of Turner. Reid
was also disingenuous. There were no other rooms
devoted to individual artists because the Tate had reneged on its
commitment to keep such, as in the case of Watts. In
Turner’s case (the proximity of the Turners, now lost through the
removal of the Rothkos to Tate Modern, had according to Reid tempted
Rothko to make his offer) there were several rooms, though five
fewer than when the Duveen wing was built for them. Rothko
apparently “seemed concerned that the young
artists might feel antagonistic” toward his pictures.
He had reason to, as they wrote a letter to The Times objecting
to Henry Moore’s proposal for a Moore wing to the Tate.
Moore nevertheless gave the Tate 37 sculptures (besides much
else), most of which are now rarely seen, being subjected to
Reid’s musical chairs.
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On 8 November we visited the
exhibition of Turner watercolours at the Courtauld
Gallery. In the
customary dim light some of the nuances were hard to appreciate.
Remarking on the showing at Grasmere Stanley Warburton
complained that it “does not stir the senses”. The
disquisition by Eric Shanes on the different media employed in a free
leaflet, The Artist’s Techniques, (which Stanley
Warburton said that he, with 70 years of working in watercolour, could
have improved) makes observations which many viewers will have to take
on trust. Indeed one may wonder how much Shanes
saw, as he says that the majority of the works “are pure
watercolours”, when that is true of relatively few such as the
early Chepstow Castle, details of which, rather than a
mixed media work which would illustrate Shanes’ points, are used
as wallpaper for the leaflet in the customary barbarous fashion.
The curators and scholars of course do not see the works under
exhibition conditions, but in a more favourable light. Perhaps
it is time to consider whether the public might have the same privilege
for limited periods and maybe for an additional charge?
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Shanes says that Turner
“undoubtedly would never have exhibited” the unfinished
works. Maybe the museums or RA would not have, but
he did occasionally in his own gallery. One
outstanding characteristic of Turner was that he was not bound by a
single orthodoxy, though repeatedly scholars ignore that, making
sweeping generalisations that he never used colours when sketching
outdoors, did not like the works of Rubens, did not care about the
preservation of his own works etc. Of course
the subtext of the remark here is that Turner was a fool not to
appreciate the unfinished works as we do and so his
will was foolish. The point was
made more explicitly by Dr David Blayney Brown, when he opened Turner
Watercolours (Tate 2007) by confidently stating, “It is
a sobering thought that the immense treasure of watercolours, drawings
and sketchbooks that forms part of the Turner Bequest at Tate Britain
would not survive had Turner himself had anything to do with it”,
a claim contradicted by “the independent minds of the Chancery
Court … in 1856”, to which he paid tribute! Brown
goes on to quote a critic, on the exhibition of Walter
Fawkes’ Turners, some with less finish than others, in 1819, who
said, “the sketches of a master possess more charms than the
laboured results; and to all men of taste they afford grounds for the
imagination to fill up, as fancy willeth, every vacant space and
unfinished outline.” So much for Dr John
Gage’s claim that this was a new C20
attitude!
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The catalogue by Dr Cecilia
Powell has been judged “a bit pedestrian” and having
“not much verve” by Stanley Warburton. This
opinion is echoed by Graham Heathcote, who says that he is bored by the
same old people always writing the catalogue over the last 30 years. It
echoes too that of Dr Powell’s tutor at the Courtauld years ago,
Professor Michael Kitson, who in 1974 wrote a slim catalogue of the
Courtauld’s Turners. Some of Kitson’s
articles have now been collected in The Seeing Eye,
edited by another pupil, Dr John Gage. A reviewer
laments that Kitson’s approach, which is that of the connoisseur
interested in the purely artistic qualities, is now outmoded.
Of the Colchester
Kitson wrote, “The
pseudo-dramatic incident of the hare being chased across the empty
foreground …is a characteristically Turnerian touch, which at
once animates the scene and draws the two sides of the composition
together.” Whereas 20 or
more years ago Eric Shanes saw it as exhibiting a “typical
Turnerian pun” with the millrace alluding to a “mill
race” in pursuit of the hare. Alternatively
the new catalogue sees a reference to a local tradition about witches.
One of our party saw it instead as a great piece of comedy, a
view having the advantage of resting on what is actually in the
picture.
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At all events one should not be
too categorical or singular in writing about Turner, who wanted to
encompass all and everything. A charge against the
present preoccupation with iconography and history is that generally it
passes over the heads of visitors, most of whom do not read the
catalogue. For them what matters is the experience
of the visit, whereas for the scholars and curators that has become a
very secondary matter. It was that aspect however
which animated the creation of the Turner Society in 1975 and then the
enthusiasm that the Turner Bequest should be housed in this wing of
Somerset House. The Turner exhibition is shown in
what was the RA’s Painting School, though few would now realise
that. Sadly today there is little respect for the
aesthetics and history of the Fine Rooms and more especially the Great
Room on the same storey, which has been divided up in order to fit in
some C20 pictures with no connection to the period of
the RA’s occupancy. The skylights have also
been blocked out. This barbarous treatment must
make the officials of the Department of the Environment who in 1975
were so anxious to recover the original appearance turn in their graves.
(A similar desecration occurs periodically in Trafalgar Square,
where Turner had envisaged his gallery, as Brian Sewell has pointed out
in the Evening Standard on 7 November). The
point I am making is illustrated by the cartoon in The Times
(13 September), “Skip the subtext, look at the context”.
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A section in Turner by
Cecilia Powell (Pitkin Guides, 2003), of which a copy has been kindly
sent to me by Mrs Iris Williams, is headed “Pleasing the
Public”. This repeats the common assertion
that “the large public exhibitions of the Royal Academy reached
only a limited number of people… However, his art reached a wide
public through engravings.” Maybe it was wider,
but was it more numerous? One might have
reason to doubt that claim, if one stops to think. Generally
the Pitkin booklet is workmanlike, but no more.
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Another misleading statement in
D.B. Brown’s Turner Watercolours came in the
Foreword by the Director of Tate Britain, Stephen Deuchar, when he
wrote “Among its [the Clore Gallery’s] many benefits was to
bring together Turner’s paintings and works on paper after
decades of separation so his genius as a draughtsman and watercolourist
can be seen alongside his pictures.” When I
urged that the Bequest should be reunited, the Tate said that was quite
unnecessary, as there was always a room of the watercolours at the Tate!
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I have made some of these points
to David Hockney CH RA, who in 1975 signed a letter to The
Times saying, “Somerset House
with its magnificent galleries and historic ties with Turner is ideally
suited” to house the Turner Bequest.
The letter went on: “For the first
time we are able to see his life’s work put together as a whole
[at the temporary exhibition at the RA] and some amends are made for
our neglect of the terms of his bequest to the nation.”
Neither aim, for a permanent reuniting and at Somerset House,
was achieved. Hockney, however, has remained silent.
The readiness of leading figures in the art world in 1975 to
speak out contrasts forcibly with the craven silence observed today, a
counterpart to the decline in artistic seriousness.
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In Who Owns Antiquity?
Museums and the Battle over our Ancient Heritage (Princeton
2008) James Cuno, formerly director of the Courtauld Institute of Art
and now of the Art Institute of Chicago, argues for universal museums
against national ones. Presumably he should
therefore have been against the division of the Tate into Tate Britain
and Tate Modern and should favour the increasingly international
character of modern art. No doubt encyclopaedic
museums such as the Louvre and British Museum have their attractions.
The question is, however: to
what degree should they monopolise major art collections? “Too
much time has been wasted in arguing the wrong issues”, says Cuno.
Indeed this dull book ignores the fact that argument based on
nationality is moving on. The Greeks now ask only
for the loan of the Elgin Marbles and renounce any claim to other Greek
antiquities at the BM. Moreover in pursuit of
connections and generalisations, Cuno diminishes the claims of
uniqueness (whether of works of art, cultures, peoples or religions).
He is also blind to the question of location, as if museums and
works of art exist in a vacuum created for intellectuals only.
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Links
www.turnermuseum.org
The Turner Museum, Florida, U.S.A.
www.spirit007genius.com
Douglass Montrose-Graem, Founder of Turner Museum
www.tate.org.uk/turnerww
Turners worldwide
www.turnersociety.org.uk
The Turner Society (1975)
www.jmwturner.org The Independent Turner Society
www.overturners.co.uk The Overturners
www.jmwturner.ca
The Setters Turners
www.faceofturner.com
The Dundee Turner portraits investigation
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www.lancs.ac.uk/users/ruskinlib/
The Ruskin Library and Centre, Lancaster University
www.brantwood.org.uk
Brantwood, Coniston
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www.wordsworth.org.uk
Wordsworth Museum & Art Gallery, Dove Cottage
www.vie-romantique.fr
Musée de la Vie Romantique, Maison Renan-Scheffer, Paris
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www.internationalbyronsociety.org
The Byron Societies
www.museocanova.it
Casa
e Gipsoteca Canoviana, Possagno
www.thorvaldsensmuseum.dk
Thorvaldsens Museum, Copenhagen
www.musee-vela.ch
Museo Vela, Ligornetto, Switzerland
www.musee-moreau.fr
Musée National Gustave Moreau, Paris
www.musee-rodin.fr
Musée National Auguste Rodin, Paris
www.wattsgallery.org.uk
Watts Gallery, Compton, Surrey, UK
www.musee-picasso.fr
Musée Picasso, Paris
www.SalvadorDaliMuseum.org
Salvador Dali Museum, St Petersburg, Florida
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Selby Whittingham,
22 November 2008.