↓↓ Contemporary art articles - older art articles →→Page one|Artists abc |Read about| See exhibitons|The museums|The channel | German Art Archives

10/20/2018

Turner, Joseph Mallord Turner - Museo National de Bellas Artes Buenos Aires

Water Colors
The Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes is proud to present, for the first time in Argentina, an exhibition of 


>> Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775 London † 1851 London 

with works from the Tate Collection of London.  (26.09.2018 - 17.02.2019). Curated by David Blayney Brown, it brings together 85 watercolours from various periods of his creative life. The show thus provides a survey of half a century of continuous output by this great English artist: from his early works at the end of the 18th century to the works of his maturity, created in the 1830s and ‘40s. 
André Malraux said that every work that ushers in a new era provides a new version of the past. Turner’s romanticism is in this category; in the history of images it makes a cut which, by conceiving of nature as a lost paradise, consigns it to a realm of myth. In the process, a past returns which becomes a present only through his visions. And in his works Nature becomes a place in which history – human action – opens up, disruptively, and sets a new course, prompting us to read in it the cipher of a bygone time: that of a virtuous union with the natural world. Turner, however, relinquishes the desire for harmony between humanity and its creations. In his oeuvre, nature invariably triumphs, wreaking vengeance on its offspring.
Privileged witness to the English Industrial Revolution, he took it upon himself to be its secret gainsayer. Locomotives, ships, bridges, cities and crowds are his dramatic characters, destiny’s playthings as they are seized by the unleashed furies of the heavens and the seas. Bodies of water, fog, light, on the other hand, turn into the active protagonists of his canvases and watercolours. Through his oeuvre’s dreamlike realism and murky technique, Turner initiated a rupture in the West’s history of visual perception, one which the Impressionists would later return to and deepen. (Text: Museo National de Bellas Artes)