The curators brilliantly mix up the types of art he experimented with, without making judgments about the 'real' Turner Turner blossoms late at the Tate in picturesThe twilight of the gods has come to Tate Britain. Like a Wagnerian opera painted in mist and fire, the late works of JMW Turner rise from silence to throbbing power, wheel out their visionary leitmotifs, and crash in apocalyptic frenzy.Wagner and Turner have a great deal in common. Both are artists of myth on a grand scale who wallow in magnificent ambiguities and lashings of atmosphere. In Turner's 1837 painting The Parting of Hero and Leander, a lover is drowned in a boiling roiling sea while heavenly fire glows red above a Greek city that hubristically totters on a mountaintop. How Wagnerian is that? It is all an allegory of doomed desire, a grandiose illumination of Turner's long, unreadable poem The Fallacies of Hope (again like Wagner, he wrote his own libretto). Continue reading...
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