Painting: Landscapist of Light

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Op-art banners fluttered from the flagpoles in the darkness overhead, and through the doors of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art surged the opening-night black-tie throng. To celebrate the first evening of spring, girls wore their gayest dresses — flaring Pucci pajamas, metal-petaled above-the-knee A-lines, the newest see-through evening gowns. The occasion for all this festivity? The Modern's salute to a painter who has been dead 114 years, Joseph M. W. Turner, the 19th century romantic saint who so believed in communion with nature that at the age of 66 he had himself lashed to the mast of a ship while crossing the English Channel so that he might the better observe the awesome spectacle of a blizzard at sea.

"It will be a stunning irony," remarked one critic, "if the most popular, consequential, stirring exhibition ever presented by the Modern Museum should turn out to be that of an old master." If Old Master Turner himself could have been present, he would probably have found it doubly ironic, and staggering as well. For up on the wall were 99 oils and watercolors that included, besides some of Turner's most famous oils, those other paintings that during his lifetime he had kept carefully hidden away in his studio along with his intimate sketchbooks and his notes on technical research. And it is Turner's lesser-known works, selected by the Tate Gallery's Keeper of British Painting Lawrence Gowing and the Modern's Monroe Wheeler, that strike contemporary sensibilities with such stunning effect.

Soapsuds & Whitewash. Turner, who in his own lifetime was recognized as perhaps the greatest painter of his era, knew his full share of both wealth and derision. Born to a Covent Garden barber in 1775, he was admitted at 14 as a student in the Royal Academy. At 27, he was elected a full-fledged academician. The works that won him fame, however, were hardly revolutionary. During his earlier years, Turner churned out Old Testament fantasies, nymphs cavorting in arcadian glades, and historical scenarios of such newsworthy topics as the battles of Waterloo and Trafalgar.

But the paintings that make Turner look as if he were born only the day before yesterday are those in which, with shimmering veils of color, he fused imagination and reality. A contemporary of Turner dubbed one such work "soapsuds and whitewash." Essayist William Hazlitt called them "pictures of nothing and very like." Yet they anticipated impressionism and even abstract expressionism.

Decayed Likeness. Turner's romanticism was directed more at his art than his private life. A reclusive bachelor till his death in 1851, he was more a stodgy old crumpet than the philanderer who, several biographers have hinted, fathered five illegitimate children. Though fame attracted him, he dodged the patrician world of fox hunts and fancy clubs, ended up living in a dilapidated London town house, cluttered with what he called his "darlings"—his paintings—or in a little Thames-side refuge where he was thought by neighbors to be a certain Admiral Booth, husband of the landlady.