Turner Monet Twombly: Later Paintings

Tate Liverpool, Albert Dock
22nd June – 28th October 2012
£12, concessions available

Reviewed by Sandra Gibson

“The sun is God.” - JMW Turner 1851

Tate Liverpool’s latest exhibition has linked the later work of painters from different generations in order to highlight common strands and influences. JMW Turner (1775 -1851) Claude Monet (1840 -1926) and Cy Twombly (1928 - 2011) are the three artists whose work has been thematically juxtaposed. Monet admired his predecessor Turner and Twombly admired both; all three painters suffered criticism as well as admiration and all three considered the same themes in the second half of their careers.

Even after all that has happened since the age of photography ushered in modernity: self-concerned expressionist angst, the divorce of colour from ‘reality’, the demise of perspective, the heyday of abstraction, folks chucking paint and piling bricks and canning excrement, a cannon firing red wax at a white wall, a bloke having himself crucified, even after all that, Joseph Mallord William Turner takes your breath away. The sheer beauty and compositional eloquence of his work does that to you. Take Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) - the Morning after the Deluge - Moses Writing the Book of Genesis, exhibited in 1843. The artist uses a circular composition with a hieroglyph (representing the holy book?) centrally placed and Moses in the background, undetailed but there as part of the swirl of light. Take Rocketing Blue Lights (Close at Hand) to Warn Steam Boats of Shoal Water, exhibited in 1840. Balanced by explosions of white, this is a composition full of movement and ambivalence - the dark rock-like cloud doubling as a cliff - which almost reaches abstraction in parts.

Turner inhabits the same space as the moderns just as surely as Monet and Twombly do, and just as surely, they inhabit his space.

The supremacy of light and a concern with depicting and expressing its interaction with the other elements was arguably a chief concern of Turner and Monet. Linked with this are paintings such as Twombly’s Quattro Stagioni (1993 - 95) which use the seasons metaphorically to reflect themes such as the transient power of youth, the decline associated with ageing and the grief of mortality. Turner’s Venice with the Salute (1840 - 45) goes a long way into the dissolution of form – the cityscape is scarcely there in the luminosity of hazy shifting light. Monet’s Rouen Cathedral Portal (Morning Effect) (1894) is less concerned with the material details of the building than with the effect of changing levels of light creating a shimmer of pale and mid blues, cobalt blue and golds.

Turner and Monet were both interested in revelation and obscuration; the effects of light and weather systems and seasonal qualities. Turner said, “Atmosphere is my style, indistinctness is my fault,” and Monet stated, “The motif is unimportant to me, what I want to reproduce is what stands between the motif and me.” Monet’s Houses of Parliament Burst of Sunlight in the Fog (1904) has the building motif secondary to the intense sunlight piercing the fog and reflecting off the water in a glorious slash of intense colour. Twombly also addresses the notion of obscuration: many of his paintings have writing over-layered by paint (which brings to mind the palimpsest) rendering it incomplete, unclear or virtually invisible, although it is apparent that something is or was there. Cy Twombly referred to himself as a “Romantic symbolist”, thus the elusive or obscure or fragmented words or lines of verse become symbolic of the loss of classical reference - perhaps of any loss - within contemporary culture - for which he grieved. In Orpheus (1979) Twombly has the mist of cultural ignorance obscuring the name of the hero who travelled to the underworld to find his wife Eurydice, here alluded to by small letters “e” and “u”, giving the painting a feeling of uncharted mystery. As well as addressing the theme of the unfound, Twombly is here saying something about the incompleteness of current culture.

On the other hand, works by Turner such as Sun Setting over a Lake, Sea and Sky, Ship in a Storm, Red Sky over a Beach, Calm Sea with Distant Grey Clouds, Coast Scene with Breaking Waves (all 1840 - 45) which also have minimal clues - suggestions of things emerging through the spacious interplay of light and water - don’t leave the viewer aware that something is missing. They satisfy on all levels.

But some of the paintings Turner did round the time of his father’s death are imbued with an elegiac, watery melancholy. The Lake, Petworth, Sunset; Sample Study (1827 - 28) makes little distinction between water and sky: the two echoing one another. The Lake, Petworth, Sunrise (1827 - 28) shows shadows of night just about to dissipate. The exquisite blues, greens, and teals in the water are echoed in the sky a muted moment before sunburst. And because the painter has chosen this moment, when there are still nocturnal elements, he has illustrated the similarity between this and sunset, rather than the differences, perhaps because this is the best expression of his grief.

Cy Twombly’s paired paintings Paesaggio (1986) also show similarities and differences. Both contain a sense of dark mystery. The first has a cavernous black area with indistinct words written in red. To the right are pale greens and a sense of stillness and then the contrasting movement of a cataract in aqua greens and white. In the second Paesaggio (1986) the dark area is larger. To the right the blues and greens have been dripped on but there is a more horizontal feel to the water. Or is it the sky?

In his later years Monet painted a series of paintings of water lilies. Thematically linked but showing differences of mood, they are associated with a time of general and specific grieving. The 1907 painting has a waterfall effect, the falling water becoming light, the horizontal areas catching light. After 1916, during the catastrophe of war, the studies of water lilies became more abstract and Monet abandoned the defined pictorial space in favour of a treatment in which earth, sky and water are not indicated by conventions such as horizons. His colour palette is often sombre: red, purple, blue, mauve and dark green with perpendicular strokes of white and yellow. The light is still there.

Twombly’s two versions of Petals of Fire (1989) depict boat-shaped red petals, black-edged and floating/falling - reminiscent of Monet’s water lilies but using a radically different palette of red, black, white and grey. One painting is more turbulent than the other, having a cloud-like area, then the petals of fire coming down. The other painting has no area of cloud and the petals are bigger, though fewer but both are powerfully charged with the emotive potency of these colours and with some of Twombly’s characteristic text - some indecipherable, some legible - including a Japanese haiku:

“evoke a moment
mind dreams again
red roses black-edged.”

Petals black-edged like funeral cards - what an important, resonating image.

Turner’s late Venetian paintings after his final trip to Venice in 1840 have a mournful air. St Benedetto Looking Towards Fusina (exhibited in 1843) has water and sky suffused with light, the sombre gondolas making a contrasting dark interest and casting shadows in the water.

Twombly’s sculptures exhibited here have this stillness about them. They appear to be made from driftwood and reference traditional funerary boats he had seen in the Cairo museum. The boat motif recurs in his work, recalling as it does the myth of Charon on the River Styx ferrying passengers from the land of the living to the land of the dead. By the Ionian Sea (1988) is white painted but the dripped paint doesn’t entirely cover it, as if to indicate transient or chance effects. This work has a sense of diagonal balance. Winter’s Passage: Luxur (1985) is not painted. The verticals and horizontals of its composition give a different kind of stability, of stillness. Its title was taken from George Gissing’s book By the Ionian Sea (1901) whose sentiment he wished to echo:

“wander endlessly amid the silence of the ancient world, today and all its sounds forgotten”

Like Turner, Monet also depicted Venice, which he visited with his second wife Alice in 1908. He completed many of his Venetian canvases after her death in 1911 as a way of coming to terms with it. Monet’s San Giorgio Maggiore (1908) has elegiac tranquillity. The painting of Vetheuil (1901) which commemorates his first wife Camille, who died in 1879 and is buried there, has an accepting silence about it.

Yet despite the emphasis on the light and the inevitability of its waning into encroaching darkness as an allegory for human transience, these works by painters in their later years do fight back; there is enduring vitality against the dying of the light. In later years Turner introduced erotic mythical themes and began to paint nude subjects from 1840 onwards. His Bacchus and Ariadne (exhibited in 1840) is eroticism cloaked in mythology but it’s the golden light that captures you as the classical buildings fade away.

Twombly returned to the erotic echoes of his early works. Wilder Shores of Love (1985) has big red writing and a passionate, diagrammatic feel to it in colours of white, black, brown, pink, and red. Camino Real III (2010) is bright lime green, orange and red with drip effects, the round strokes repeated, giving the work the sensational brash vitality of a modern poster, freshly done, the paint not dry. His Untitled (1990) painting has an explosion of colour combined with spaciousness - there’s quite a bit of white - and Untitled (1991) has a frantic feeling of movement in the brush strokes.

There is dynamic, sensuous brushwork also in Monet’s late work. Water lily ponds traditionally formed the backdrop for erotic encounters and flowing rivers and empty boats also connote female sexuality. His painting The Japanese Footbridge (1920 - 22) has tremendous vitality of movement in the brush strokes and is almost abstract, like Twombly’s paintings of sunsets.

But Twombly’s enduring nostalgic melancholy for the “silence of the ancient world” deserves investigation. It’s like the Pythonesque, “What did the Romans ever do for us?” question. Twombly used classical and other cultural allusions in his work because he believed they had relevance and potency and he regretted the demise of a classical education such as that enjoyed by previous generations. Knowing the story from the classics means that the mere mention of a name e.g. Narcissus or Homer or Oedipus or Antigone brings to mind all the associations and links them with the contemporary thing the present poet, painter or musician is saying. It follows that ignorance of these myths is an impoverishment preventing the immediacy of recognition and comprehension. The same can be said for a person from, say, a western culture trying to comprehend what is happening in a Tibetan thangka or a Japanese koan. Our response is limited by the paucity of our knowledge. However, there will always be some response, some level of comprehension based on the effect of colour, shape, image on our mind. There are always some reverberations.

Does one need to know the story of Hero and Leander, as addressed in Twombly’s four paintings: Hero and Leandro? Does knowing the myth enhance our visual and emotional experience?

The Myth of Hero and Leander: from Encyclopedia Mythica

A youth of Abydos in Egypt…was in love with Hero, a young priestess of Aphrodite at Sestos. To be with her, he swam each night across the Hellespont, guided by a lamp which Hero had lighted earlier in the evening. During one stormy night, the wind extinguished the lamp and Leander, lost and overcome with fatigue, drowned. Unable to cope with her loss Hero flung herself into the sea.

Turner’s treatment of this story is also exhibited. His painting The Parting of Hero and Leader (1837) is a narrative work that has many disparate elements - there’s a lot going on in terms of the classical buildings and figurative happenings and sea waves and it’s easy to become diverted by issues of dodgy perspective if you’re a pedant like me. Turner tries to tell the whole story and its culmination whereas Twombly focuses on the actual parting through death. I would suggest that Twombly’s treatment of the myth is more single-pointedly focused on the tragedy of the ending. He gives an experiential opportunity, a graphic sense of the power of the waves and the red colour of tragedy and the ensuing calm of death. Some would suggest that the evocation of blood also refers to Hero’s fate: unable to cope with her loss, she jumped in too.The four paintings can be “read” beginning with Leander’s struggle against the sea and then his succumbing to the elemental forces until,

see how his body dips
Dead-heavy; arms and shoulders gleam awhile;
He's gone; up bubbles all his amorous breath!

And Twombly writes this last line, taken from a Keats sonnet, in the fourth painting.

Twombly’s other treatment: Hero and Leandro (to Christopher Marlowe) (1985) refers again to the fate of the mythical lovers. The turbulence in the painting, the red of the blood, the tranquil grey, all concentrate the events of the sequence of four into one painting. Arguably a step too far?

Knowing the romantic story of the lovers does not necessarily enhance my response to the paintings. A mind contemplating the narrative possibilities of illicit love and Aphrodite getting annoyed and separation by death might be diverted from the concentrated experience of struggle followed by death: an analogy for our human existence which Twombly - and Keats - so minimally offer us.

Because that is what good art does. It cuts to the chase.

Offered as a conversation proving the similarities between three painters, this exhibition succeeds. Turner and Monet are already established; I think that this juxtaposition has raised the profile of Twombly as a considerable painter seeking to reassert something of the traditional by using modern methods, such as incorporating the written word for its meaning, its resonance - as well as its shape - into his works.

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