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Turner is the last victim, and the most illustrious, of this need to force the language of painting, to which Rembrandt and Velasquez give wings and a soul by permitting painting to follow their objective vision, and to unite that vision with their imaginary world. His desire certainly goes beyond, and far beyond, the equanimity of sentiment and the pacific positivism of the other English painters. He was almost the only one to see the sulphur sun shining at the depth of the mist. It was for him alone that the livid river showed itself through the trailing smoke. He surprised great phantoms in the fog and the rain, towers of brick and of old stone, ships, black chimneys, and red lanterns piercing the confused darkness, as a muffled cry issues from a great murmur, only to go back into it the instant afterward. He felt the sea and the light of the tropics enter the somber city with the tarred hulls and the sails of the vessels, with the wandering flight of the sea gulls, and with the phosphorescent slime, and mingled with their vanished wake, the indistinct echoes of receding streets, of docks, of sinister places, and of parks bathed in emerald, full of trees and of herds. And by an incredibly gallant lyric effort he tried to transpose this turbid and splendid material to an imaginary world where he mounted so high that the rarefied air could not sustain his flight.
Turner is the last victim, and the most illustrious, of this need to force the language of painting, to which Rembrandt and Velasquez give wings and a soul by permitting painting to follow their objective vision, and to unite that vision with their imaginary world. His desire certainly goes beyond, and far beyond, the equanimity of sentiment and the pacific positivism of the other English painters. He was almost the only one to see the sulphur sun shining at the depth of the mist. It was for him alone that the livid river showed itself through the trailing smoke. He surprised great phantoms in the fog and the rain, towers of brick and of old stone, ships, black chimneys, and red lanterns piercing the confused darkness, as a muffled cry issues from a great murmur, only to go back into it the instant afterward. He felt the sea and the light of the tropics enter the somber city with the tarred hulls and the sails of the vessels, with the wandering flight of the sea gulls, and with the phosphorescent slime, and mingled with their vanished wake, the indistinct echoes of receding streets, of docks, of sinister places, and of parks bathed in emerald, full of trees and of herds. And by an incredibly gallant lyric effort he tried to transpose this turbid and splendid material to an imaginary world where he mounted so high that the rarefied air could not sustain his flight.
He
seems like a bird wheeling about in the lightning, intoxicated by electric
storms and blinded by the flashes. Wherever he is on the planet and in history,
whether he voyages with Shakespeare across ancient and Romanesque Italy,
whether he plunges with van Goyen into the illuminated mist, or whether he
visits, with Homer, the old heroic universe where the flame of the volcanoes
and the song of the sirens lead Ulysses in his wanderings over the ocean,
whether, suffocated by the wind, and drenched in salt and spray, he joins in
the rescue of men shipwrecked on a fishing boat, or whether he accompanies
Nelson amid the thunder of the cannon and the smoke, with the flags flying and
the great sails torn, everywhere that sea water, and the water of heaven, and
the sun mingle, he saw, in a land of supernatural legend, an aerial palace
borne by the clouds, reddening in twilights and dawns which he confronted,
flooded with bloody shadows and with coruscations of opals, sapphires, and
rubies. One day he fixed his eyes on the setting sun of Claude. And
thenceforward he cared to see no one else. The solid architectures have become
translucent specters behind the fantastic fog, which permits the English
country to show through only as furtive apparitions, supernatural at times,
when the moon rises, or when the evening light, piercing the watery veil, where
it is partly torn, shows the top of a tower suspended in the clouds, the
turning beam of a searchlight, or the dark and flaming globe that sinks little
by little. Everything becomes unreal and distant, like that water where
Claude's sun, before disappearing, leaves its trail of liquid purple. It alone
reigns from dawn to darkness, filling the world and filling history, bursting
and scattering over them in explosions of blood and flame.
The
superficial harmonies on which the English painters, since the time of van
Dyck, had been expending their virtuosity, were to find their consummation in
that strange art of Turner's, which marks the definitive separation of form
from color, and the flight of painting into space alone, isolated from all
material support, from every visible volume, from every deep bond with the
universe of the senses. In reality, that sky and that water, confusedly mingling
and seething in the incandescent flame, conceal an obvious coldness of the
senses, a complete impotence to understand and supply an equivalent for the
trunk and the intermediate branches which forever connect and render sensible,
for one another and through one another, the roots of mankind and the perfume
of its spirit. Turner masks the indigence of his color under fireworks. The
light blinds him. He no longer sees anything but the light. Everything that it
illuminates has disappeared. By itself, miracle that it is, it avenges the
forgotten earth and the misunderstood heaven. The great harmonic unity of the
world crumbles in places and wavers everywhere. Veiled by these gems, broken by
these reflections of imaginary fires, the soil loses its consistency, the air
thickens, that which is hard becomes fluid, that which is fluid becomes
compact, the planes go flying, the values are jumbled, and the disunited
universe floats like a luminous smoke torn to shreds by the wind. The poetic
emotion and sentiment, superior, doubtless, to the means of expression,
evaporate almost entirely, and no longer impress any save those who have not
learned to understand the language of painting. Turner demonstrates both the
lyric grandeur of the English soul and the impotence of English painting to
communicate it.
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