Turner: Imagination and Reality

by Lawrence Gowing

Turner

Genres: Art

64 pages, Perfect Paperback

Published January 1, 1966

About the author

Sir Lawrence Gowing was an English artist, writer, curator, and teacher. Initially recognized as a portrait and landscape painter, he quickly rose to prominence as an art educator, writer, and, eventually, curator and museum trustee. As a student of art history he was largely self-taught.

Sir Lawrence was born Lawrence Burnett Gowing to Horace Gowing, a draper, and his wife, Luisa. Born in Stoke Newington and raised in London, his first painting of note, Mare Street, Hackney, made reference to his father's shop. After attending the Downs School at Colwall, Herefordshire and Leighton Park School, in 1938 he enrolled in the Euston Road School, where he studied with William Coldstream.

He was Principal of the Slade School of Fine Art at University College, London from 1975 to 1985.

Reviews

[Richard Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book--a catalogue to accompany an exhibition at MOMA (the first time they had an exhibition of an artist dead for more than a century)--because Andrew Graham-Dixon called it the greatest essay that he’d read on art. It is a fine essay, a long way from the “art bollocks,” as Lin describes much writing on art. The book has a theory--that Turner was progressively turning away from “reality” to paint just light and colour (so forging a path that the Abstract Expressionists followed a century later).

I wrote a blog about Andrew Graham Dixon’s talk:
https://richardswsmith.wordpress.com/...

And I’ve posted quotes from the book on my blog:
https://richardswsmith.wordpress.com/...