J. M. W. Turner: The Making of a Modern Artist (review)

As Sam Smiles notes to begin this book, while the secondary literature on J. M. W. Turner is vast, scholars have generally opted for one of two approaches to this complex artist. One account emphasizes Turner's late, sometimes unfinished, work, with its looseness of handling, saturated color, and obscure thematics, so that the artist seems to transcend time and place to inform later modernist movements, such as French Impressionism and American Abstract Expressionism. The other approach has been to ground Turner's work, early and late, in the aesthetic and historical context of his lifetime, revealing his academic background, ties to the Old Masters, and interest in narrative.

Uniting these approaches, however, has been an underlying assumption of Turner's genius, and an unquestioning belief in the availability of a coherent subject for art historical exegesis. Though he does not state it as such, in J. M. W. Turner: The Making of a Modern Artist, Smiles's Turner is less the Promethean author/subject and more the absented Foucauldian author-function, whose subjectivity is produced by the discursive investments of the curators, critics, and historians who have written about him since his death. Smiles's book, therefore, represents a significant moment in Turner studies and should become standard reading for students and scholars, not only of this artist, but of modernism as a whole.

Chapter 1 considers Turner's own views toward crafting his legacy and his attitudes toward the lasting fame of artists. It is with the second chapter, however, that Smiles comes to his primary subject: the various posthumous constructions and reconstructions of Turner's reputation. One of his study's significant accomplishments is its identification of the variety of forums in which the task of coming to terms with Turner's complex oeuvre was attempted and the degree to which this project was closely interlinked with questions of British cultural self-identity. In this chapter, which will be of particular interest to Victorianists, Smiles also reveals that even while Turner's reputation as a figure of unrivalled stature and importance was consolidated in the last half of the nineteenth century, both museum displays and critical writings betray ambivalence about some aspects of his production.

Thus, for instance, the value of the late oils was debated by a House of Commons Select Committee in the early 1860s, with opinions split regarding their aesthetic and/or educational value. It is clear that for much of the nineteenth century the prevailing view was that the late works represented a serious decline from the genius of the early ones. Smiles shows here that the Turner Gallery and publications like the Art Journal however, set about visually mediating the difficulty of these works for the viewing public, using the monochromatic medium of engravings to tone down the intense colors and to add detail and specificity to Turner's work.

Smiles also introduces important nuance into the record of nineteenth-century critical art writing about Turner. While his account of John Ruskin's Turner is justifiably brief, given the amount of secondary literature already available on this topic, it gains new significance in the context of the lesser-known texts discussed in detail here. Smiles shows how Ruskin's influence waned later in the century, as writers like P. G. Hamerton and W. C. Monkhouse deemphasized the importance of Turner's naturalism, finding instead in his work a valuing of the inherent expressiveness of the work of art above any resemblance to the objective world. Because of their own Victorian aestheticism, these writers could value the ethereal, formless quality of the later works.

The next chapter follows the further modification of Turner's reputation in line with developing English and French modernist discourses as the late paintings are now valorized for their links to French Impressionism. Again, Smiles is at his strongest in this section, where he shows how critical and curatorial assessments were intertwined, as when...