Visual Arts

Tongue only partly in cheek, Oscar Wilde cited London's famous pea-soup fogs as proof that life imitates art.

"Where," he wrote, "if not from the impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows?"

Monet and Pissarro were the dernier cri of art in 1889, when Wilde wrote The Priority of Art. Nearly four decades after the death of Joseph Mallord William Turner, Wilde already could dismiss the great English painter of hazes and storms as passé.

"Sunsets are quite old-fashioned," Wilde continued. "They belong to a time when Turner was the last note in art."

Another century on, we're readier to award the fog patent to Turner. Decades before Monet painted London's new Houses of Parliament, Turner set scenes in luminous – and sometimes not so luminous – hazes. He painted sea scenes swirling in lashing rain and wind, roiling clouds and boiling waters. Some of his late paintings push the study of light and atmosphere toward advanced abstraction.

Those late and relatively abstract paintings have come to dominate latter-day perceptions of Turner. But a major Turner exhibition opening today at the Dallas Museum of Art fills out a far more complex view of the artist.

Dallas is the second of only three stops for the show, introduced last October at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. From Dallas it goes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Billed as the largest and most comprehensive Turner show ever presented in the United States, it's a collaboration among the three American museums and London's Tate Britain, the world's greatest repository of Turners. Led by the Tate's Ian Warrell, the show's organizers were Franklin Kelly of the National Gallery, Gary Tinterow of the Metropolitan and Dorothy Kosinski of the DMA.

There are, of course, some eye-poppers among the more than 140 works. Walk into the DMA's Chilton Galleries, and in the far distance you'll see the enormous (8 ½ -by-12-foot) Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805, ghostly white sails billowing in confusion. Near the end of the procession, the vast conflagration of the 1834 Houses of Parliament fire rages in two different views, in paintings brought together from Philadelphia and Cleveland.

But the range of work covers early illustrations prepared for architects and castles Turner painted for well-heeled patrons. We see the well-traveled artist as illustrator of numerous travel books, and, in a series titled Liber Studiorum, entrepreneurial promoter of his own landscape mastery. Indeed, it was by engravings of his watercolors – and John Ruskin's five-volume Modern Painters – that Turner's fame was most widely disseminated during his lifetime.

Along with his more parochial contemporary, John Constable, Turner made contemporary landscape painting respectable. Previously, such work had been considered a less noble pendant to portrayals of historical, biblical, mythological and literary scenes. Like many other 19th-century painters, Turner was much influenced by philosopher Edmund Burke's notion of "the sublime": the vast and sometimes overwhelming vistas and forces of nature.

Even as a mature artist, Turner could return to genres well-mined by artists as different as Ruisdael, Poussin and Claude Lorrain. But even when echoing the latter, as in The Temple of Jupiter Panellenius, Restored, Turner can't resist adding an ironic note, with a foreground procession of revelers in bizarre contortions.

No painter has more viscerally relished or more dramatically portrayed scenes of disaster, from the Parliament fire to storms as sea. But for all the theatricality of such paintings, it's the sheer breadth of Turner's mastery that impresses at the DMA. And even in the most "advanced" paintings Turner evinces an almost classical care with balancing weights and forces.

He is capable of arresting beauty, as in Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight. The bristling ships on the right, with their onboard lights and fires, would seem to load the painting off-center. But the moon, radiating into swirls of almost tactile clouds, pulls the energy back toward the middle of the scene.

In another sea scene, Peace – Burial at Sea, the most striking, indeed unsettling, image is the off-center ship, its sails eerily black in the dying light. But the fiery light at the committal ceremony centers the focus – if that's the word – even as smoke from the coal-fired steamer's engines drifts off on a diagonal. Even the almost completely abstract 1842 Snow Storm (to shorten the complete 31-word title) fastidiously balances those swirling grays, browns and blacks.

It's as a painter of light and other atmospheric effects that Turner is most honored. His penchant for yellowish sunsets was much noted, and often derided, during his lifetime. One critic quipped that there were two Turners, one who sold mustard and one who painted it. Another likened the artist to a cook with an unhealthy appetite for curry powder.

Oscar Wilde notwithstanding, Turner's jaundiced atmospheres probably owed a good deal to the coal-fired Industrial Revolution. As Dallasites know only too well, airborne pollution can make for spectacular sunsets.

And, in advance of the impressionists and pointillists, Turner was concerned with the process of seeing, how paint on canvas can trick the eye into perceiving texture and depth. This elevation of process vis-à-vis product makes Turner seem a genuine forebear of artistic modernism, much of which would make process its very point.

Those wispy clouds layered around setting suns can be quite heavily streaked in. Turner was one of the first artists to use a palette knife, not just brushes, to lay on paint more thickly – and supply distinctive dappling effects.

With yellows, reds and oranges in gnarly dabs, the two burning Parliament paintings nearly burst out of their frames. Even in his watercolors, less well-known but generously represented in the DMA show, Turner sometimes scratched the paper to give more tactile effects. Indeed, one thrust in Turner's oil paintings was an attempt to re-create something of the washed and bleeding effects of watercolors.

Much of what strikes us as Turner's most "modern" art didn't surface until after his death, when his personal stash of nearly 300 paintings and 30,000 sketches and studies was willed to the British nation. (It became the basis of the Tate's famed collection.)

In the circa 1845 Norham Castle, Sunrise one can just make out a hazy river scene, with an animal (dog? cow?) reflected in foreground water and a yellow sun glowing through fog. If we hadn't been told the purple blotch represents a castle, we wouldn't have known. Even more astonishing is a series of watercolor studies, some only the vaguest squiggles of color, Turner dashed off in preparation for the Parliament fire paintings.

Earlier advanced as proof of Turner's move toward bold abstraction – George Inness and Mark Rothko can't be far off – works such as these are now more widely understood as studies or unfinished paintings never intended for exhibition. Still, for a barber's son born the year before the American Declaration of Independence, Turner was undeniably one of the most progressive artists of his time, and for decades after his death.

A bold innovator, Turner also deeply honored his precursors. Astonishingly prolific for six decades, he painted scenes of modern disaster and ancient decay, of classical placidity and contemporary turbulence. His canvases alternately glow, glower and curdle.

Famously awkward in speech, often secretive in his private life, he was an aggressive art entrepreneur, with his own gallery and publications. On public "varnishing days" before exhibitions, he relished upstaging his contemporaries with virtuoso last-minute detailings of his paintings.

No artist has a greater claim to being the last of the traditionalists and the first of the moderns. And no exhibition could make that clearer than the DMA's.Plan your life

"J.M.W. Turner" opens today and continues through May 18 at the Dallas Museum of Art, 1717 N. Harwood St. Hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays through Sundays, and 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursdays; the museum stays open until midnight on the third Friday of each month. $18; discounts for seniors, students and children. 214-922-1200, www.dallasmuseumofart.org.

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