The story is told of a stagecoach passing through a particularly wooded area of Great Britain, under a sky overloaded with threatening clouds. A distinguished lady and a man of a freakish appearance were among the passengers. At the beginning of the predicted storm, the man, excusing himself, opened the window and stuck his head out into the open, defying the swaying of the vehicle and the inclement weather. After a while, the woman asked what he was looking at so excitedly, and the man replied that he had seen “marvelous things never seen before.” Attracted by curiosity, the lady leaned out of the window to see the marvel.
Years later, the same lady visited the exhibition of a painter who was much criticized for the greenish and yellowish stains that he included in his canvases of fantastic landscapes that even seemed supernatural; scenes that the lady had already seen once under a storm while crossing Great Britain. The author of the works was none other than William Turner.
Turner was the great master of British landscape painting. He captured, like no one else, the infinitude and roughness of nature. He approached the landscape from contemplation as an introduction to the infinite wisdom of nature through an exclusively optical relationship.
A landscape is formed when its limits are clear. Turner’s work creates an absolute presence of infinite openness that leads to freedom and confers the freedom to those who observe the savagery of that. It goes beyond the romantic spectacle of finding enjoyment in the inhospitable, in the disorientation, and vertigo of the sublime.
Kant defines the sublime as the reflection of one’s own insignificance, the conception of the infinite. It’s that overwhelming feeling with which one reaches the awareness of one’s own moral superiority over nature. Turner not only outlined this feeling plastically but surpassed it through an extraordinary use of color, taking it to the limits.
With the sfumato and chiaroscuro, Leonardo and Rembrandt had already admitted the chromatic variety of the penumbra, and Turner entered into the density of the darkness making it visible and extrapolating the chromatic varieties that are in it.
William Turner’s landscapes play with light and with all the luminous possibilities of the sun, becoming a true master of light, darkness, and the chromatic varieties of the atmosphere. He was a true provocateur in the difficult task of containing the unbridled roughness of nature.
Story published in Spanish in Cultura Colectiva News
