Exhibitions
Visual poetry
Andrew Lambirth
Turner Whistler Monet Tate Britain until 15 May Sponsored by Ernst & Young It could so easily not have worked, this bold (some might say foolhardy) juxtaposition of three such dissimilar artists. Particularly if one of them was felt to be somehow of inferior power — the sick man of the trio — a position which might have been reserved (by those who judge from ignorance) for James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903). What a mistake that would have been, and what a triumph this exhibition turns out to be. It has been superlatively hung and installed in the Tate’s often unfriendly basement galleries, and is an absolute joy to look at. There are a hundred paintings, prints, pastels and watercolours on show, and they deserve the tribute of repeated visits, if you can stomach the crowds which will undoubtedly flock to any exhibition with the name Monet in it. Advance tickets are already selling well. Admission is a fairly hefty £10, so it’s almost worth becoming a Tate Member (from £49). It’s certainly an exhibition you want to linger in.
The show starts with Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851), the most senior of the three, and in many ways the greatest. Whistler and Monet were friends and colleagues, but neither met Turner, and could only admire his work from afar. There were, however, displays of his paintings to be seen in London when the American–British Whistler and the Frenchman Monet visited, and, in Whistler’s case, settled here, and the first room contains examples of this sort. The visitor is greeted appropriately enough by a small early Turner oil on mahogany panel entitled ‘Moonlight, a Study at Millbank’. (How the locale has changed. Perhaps some YBA should recreate the view with the Tate boat zipping emptily across to Bankside.) Somewhat tentative, perhaps, but the handling is already assured, and the principal shared theme of the exhibition is clearly stated — the effects of light at the expense of form. In fact, despite the apparent ‘realism’ of Turner’s approach at this period, as can be seen in the magnificent tree-lined ‘Mortlake Terrace’ on a summer evening, form is already being dissolved in light. (The river wall disappears in a glitter of gold and silver.) In the same room are daring watercolour studies of light, ‘St Michael’s Mount’, ‘Shields Lighthouse’ and ‘The Scarlet Sunset: A Town on a River’. The near-equivalent of the last in oil, ‘Sun Setting over a Lake’ (c.1840–5), contrasts vividly in its vertiginous abstraction with the much earlier and more descriptive ‘Chichester Canal; Sample Study’ of c.1828. The range of Turner is here economically suggested.
Turner is the acknowledged master of depicting nature’s drama, and even in his lifetime Ruskin considered him unique in the truth to nature he was able to achieve. But his more extreme experiments were beyond Ruskin’s comprehension, as indeed the later works of Whistler were to prove so famously to be. Room 2 introduces Whistler’s early Thames-side pictures, when he skulked down in Wapping and Rotherhithe and painted the shipping and etched the foreshore. These essays in realism include paintings of Old Battersea Bridge and Reach, which now look remarkably old-fashioned, however boldly painted. We will have to wait for Room 3 for Whistler’s apotheosis; in Room 2 Monet, with his Pool of London and Seine paintings, comes off best. ‘Sunset on the Seine, Winter Effect’ is a fine strong painting, but ‘Floating Ice’, all luscious pinks and blues, with its foretaste of the waterlily pictures, is beautifully evocative.
The exhibition’s elegant design really comes into its own in Room 3. Whistler’s Nocturnes are hung against a warm chocolate-coloured wall: three pale blue/green paintings grouped together (the betterknown ones from the Tate), and two subfusc but exquisite grey-brown ones on the opposite wall. ‘The Falling Rocket’ (1875), which provoked Whistler’s libel action against Ruskin, is accorded a wall of its own. There is a bench in the centre of the room to sit on: I recommend you pause to consider such quietly subversive splendour. The spare hang enables Whistler’s magic, his distilled visual poetry, to permeate the gallery. The court case bankrupted Whistler, and he was forced to leave his Chelsea home. But he did not desert the Thames (though he did pay a fruitful visit to Venice), and this exhibition remains a telling tribute to that majestic river, which nurtured the young Turner and provided a principal source of inspiration for Whistler and Monet.
If it’s possible to speak of an exhibition’s phrasing — its structure and pauses, its emphases and omissions — then this is a highpoint in Turner Whistler Monet. The next great flourish comes in Room 5, the centrepiece of which is Turner’s aweinspiring ‘Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16th October 1834’, borrowed from Philadelphia. This is a masterpiece that needs prolonged, or renewed, contemplation, since we are not likely to see it often in a lifetime. The whole room has been built around it, as is witnessed by the fact that the rest of the pictures are excatalogue, and thus not originally intended for the show, but assembled from the Tate’s collection to set it off. Rooms 6 and 7 are something of an anti-climax after this, though there are many notable things to see, including an incredibly free nearly abstract oil by Claude Monet (1840–1926) of Charing Cross Bridge, and a memorable sunlight in fog painting of Waterloo Bridge. The last rooms begin to be strangely reminiscent of the Tate’s Turner and Venice exhibition of 2003–4, and end rather depressingly with two of Monet’s Palazzo paintings, and his surprisingly vulgar depiction of ‘San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk’. Despite several Monet variations on the theme of the Houses of Parliament, he is the artist least well served by this selection. I suspect that, for many, Whistler will be the revelation of the show.
This exhibition is now at its third and final museum location, having garnered much praise at previous venues in Toronto and Paris. It is accompanied by another weighty and sumptuous catalogue which will feature for a month or so on coffee tables up and down the country and then be consigned to the bookshelf, largely unread. Like so many exhibitions nowadays, it is theory-driven, in this case reliant upon ‘a pattern of themes and variations begun by Turner [which] appears to have been developed in the artistic interchange between the younger artists Whistler and Monet’. Mark that ‘appears to have been’. Curators should beware of forging such links between generations too tightly. More knowledge and research can add to our enjoyment of works of art, but doesn’t necessarily do so. Reassessment is sometimes but not always appropriate, and there are limits beyond which it is advisable not to stray. ‘Whistler,’ we are told, ‘is ripe for repositioning.’ How he would have loved that. So, enough of ‘avant-garde gambits’, this is not a collocation for art historians, it’s a visual entertainment for a paying public. They want to see great art, and, luckily, with this show they get it.
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