Like a firework

It’s like when you’re awaiting the grand finale at the fireworks display: the Turner exhibition at the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco has 80 works by the illustrious British master (1775-1851) and has travelled from London’s Tate gallery, but it is the final room that features the culmination. The conclusion of the exhibition alone makes the visit worthwhile.

Flirting with abstraction

It showcases the artist’s final work, when he ended up flirting with abstraction in his depiction of elemental turmoil. Nonetheless “Turner, le sublime heritage” at the Grimaldi Forum also establishes a dialogue with fifteen contemporary artists. It should be noted that the master would have been quite enough on his own, and the parallels established with the current creators aren’t always great.

Late Rothko

But let’s return to the final room where a unique canvas by Turner is placed alongside a painting, also one of his final ones, by Rothko (1903-1970) marked by a large splash of brown and another in black. Here the exchange works in a spectacular manner: we no longer know who did what. The Turner canvas is striped with five bands of colour in shades of beige to brown.

Elisabeth Brooke

As the curator of the exhibition, Elizabeth Brooke, explains: “to facilitate transportation sometimes Turner would paint several landscapes on the same roll of fabric. Here there are three seascapes that haven’t been separated. They were recovered like this from his studio and have been preserved this way ever since.”

32 000 pieces

The exhibition demonstrates Turner’s belligerence in his quest for a landscape that’s capable of creating an emotion to the point of completely diluting the subject. He left no less than 32,000 pieces to the British institution – not all true artworks, clearly – out of the 70,000 that constitute the museum’s collection. The loan granted to Monaco is the largest ever made for the artist.

Climatic effects

His watercolours, which are particularly fragile, require a particular regime of 10 years of rest before a maximum of sixteen months on display. It is among these small paintings on paper, of which there are many at the Grimaldi Forum, made in the open air on a mountaintop, next to a lake or in a wild storm in the open sea, that we see his desire to record climatic effects.

Famous Rigi

In 1842, for example, he depicted Rigi, the mountain near Lucerne, at sunrise in transparent layers of blue and pale yellow. What resembles a mystical apparition is one of his most famous works on paper. “Before Turner, landscapes weren’t even an accepted form of painting. He established them as a legitimate kind of art,” observes the curator of the exhibition. To create his compositions, as fanciful as they are, he would always start by experiencing a real landscape.

Physical experience

This requires a physical experience. So in 1810 he hiked through the Grisons to witness an avalanche, which he then depicted in all its violence. When he was making an oil on canvas in 1827, “Study of Sea and Sky” on the Isle of Wight, he found himself boarding a boat. Long before the impressionists, but also like them, he was seeking to capture his environment from life.

Whaling industry

We discover in Monaco that Turner also had preoccupations that we might call political or environmental. In 1846 he derisively recorded the whaling industry in “Hurrah! for the Whaler Erebus! Another Fish”. Out of a thick yellowish mist emerge small clusters of men on a makeshift vessel. The world-ending sky, immense and grandiose, mourning these giant mammals, has lost its blue hue.

As Rothko said jokingly about the painter: “This man Turner, he learnt a lot from me”. From the 19^th century, Joseph Mallord William Turner speaks perfectly to our times.

Until 1 September. www.grimaldiforum.com/fr/agenda-manifestations-monaco/exposition-turner-le-sublime-heritage