Turner’s Modern World review – contemporary artists take note

Where is Joseph William Mallard Turner today, when we really need him? The Flight from Afghanistan from his brush and palette knife would be a monumental work, and entirely in keeping with the theme of the brilliant “Turner’s Modern World” show at Tate Britain.

Turner’s Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon Coming On is exhibited, a perfect illustration of the contradictory modern world the artist sought to capture in paint – not all from a palette of optimism – for the Victorian brave new world. Turner was a commentator, but never a proselytiser. Here it is. Draw your own conclusions. 

The controversial bête noir of the Royal Academy would surely treat the abandonment of Afghanistan with similar vigour, capturing the abject cowardice of leaving innocents to die and the indignity of swapping a principled foreign policy for short term gains in upcoming American midterm elections. 

Centre canvas, a trundling C17 military aircraft, refugees clinging to and falling helplessly from its fuselage, emerging from an impressionist crowd of the hopeless, in trudging lockstep with its slow progress to the main runway. Turner cues in the foreground – flags of the deserter nations, a sun setting on the era of Western peacekeeping hegemony, a troubled distant sky of international consequences. 

Al Qaeda scumbags look on from the left side. And his trademark red splodge, this time not a buoy in a storm catching the viewer’s eye, but a teenager tumbling from the rising undercarriage to shatter on the ground.

The painting would be excoriated by today’s establishment cognoscenti, as were most of Turner’s later abstract works in his day. Simply not understood. Or, too uncomfortable to come to terms with. If he could recall who painted it, Joe Biden would condemn it at his annual press conference.

Tate Britain’s show is about much more than Turner’s modern world. It navigates a path through his output, with a focus on the increasing intervention of the evolving machine age, especially in pastoral settings. In comparison with American landscape contemporaries, such as Thomas Cole, who sought to reassure by dropping unlikely Greek temple motifs into unconquered, mostly hostile, frontier scenery, Turner gives us forges, bellows, factories, belching chimneys and engines driven by steam. The unvarnished future.

The artist is probably better known than any other in Britain, so what’s new? Is this a rehash of old familiars? Same old – but with the canvasses deftly rearranged, like comfortable furniture in a country house sitting room? After all, custodians of the Turner Bequest have to justify their existence.

Far from it. Not only does the show dispel any misconceived notion that “good old Turner” was only a chocolate box painter, by implication a finger points at lauded art Gods and Goddesses of today. In comparison with Turner, our current stars all seem self-absorbed psychotics. 

A prime example is Tracey Emin. I admire her work, and she may rejoice in painting in the light of Turner’s Margate, but her canvasses and sculptures tell only of herself, not much about the world she lives in. The giveaway is her current fascination with Edvard Munch. The Scream must rank as the most self-absorbed painting in recognised art. 

“The Loneliness of the Soul – Tracy Emin/Edvard Munch” exhibition, which has just closed at the Royal Academy, and her prizewinning sculpture The Mother which will greet visitors to the glitzy Munch Museum opening in Oslo in October, confirm a commitment to introspection as her dominant meme. If the notorious unmade bed didn’t make the point, this current Munchtrip she is on does.

She is just one in a crowded field. Think of the work of Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud, Damien Hirst – especially industrial output “me, me, me,” Damien – David Hockney, Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon and Jenny Saville. Projection of self is their dominant theme. Brilliant, but narrow thematically. Ultimately self-indulgent.

Every era needs its narrator. Where are the observers of our social condition today? The likes of John Nash, Paul Nash, David Bomberg, Percy Wyndham Lewis and Anna Airey, may have been uniquely focused on WWI, but they were painting outside themselves, had something to say about the tragedies engulfing them. They and their Second World War successors provided an in your face wake up call to the horrors of war. This was – and still is – important. I am hard-pressed to identify any similar weighty contemporaries – with, perhaps, the exception of Banksy, our street commentator par excellence. 

So, the time is ripe for a Tate Britain refresher course on Turner’s penetrating observational powers. The show is set in eight galleries. Introduction; Signs of the Time – Early Work; War and Peace; Modern Thought; Home Front; Causes and Campaigns; Steam and Speed; and, finally, Modern Painter. Great use is made of Turner’s prolific sketchbooks and some uncompleted works recovered from his studio after his death. 

Viewers faced with all too familiar works are invited to walk this pathway, dig deeper, look at Turner with fresh eyes. Pause to quietly absorb the significance of Turner’s iconic The Flying Temeraire. Surely, we know all about that. A heroic old ship of the Napoleonic wars off to the knackers’ yard. Jingoistic sentimentality. Not a dry eye in the house.

In the context of the Tate show, it emerges as much more. Patriotic acknowledgement of proud history, yes. But also, a wake-up call to confront a passing era, understand the historical impact of changing times and reflect on a potentially inglorious future. That tiny, steam-driven, busy-body boiler-fire-spitting tug is an industrial revolution on the move. 

Today it might be a bossy Covid form filler. Our future! Is the tug really under control? God forbid! Are we the Temeraire?

The same goes for Speed – the new age steam train emerging pell-mell from nowhere over a bridge, aimed right at the observer and scattering wildlife in its path – a fleeing hare desperately seeking to avoid destruction. That’s probably us, folks.

Limited attendance due to Covid is a blessing. There is no hugger-mugger. The viewer can promenade. The exhibition is well described in “on the wall” notices. The mobile phone downloadable commentary is particularly helpful. There is excellent further analysis on Tate Britain’s website – a recommended pre-read. 

Originally scheduled until March 2021 the extension until September is not surprising. Turner is a national icon who needs occasional, fresh interpretation. I reinterpreted while enjoying the Kusama inspired cakes and sweets in the Members’ Room upstairs. Great to be back.  

And then, a half-hour on the way out with an old familiar, Sir Stanley Spencer, the only artist on the planet to see twee Cookham as the likely location for the second coming. Double-vaxxed and Turner at Tate Britain. Almost normal.

You can book Turner’s Modern World at the Tate Britain until 12 September.