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Crown Art Library
Turner. Crown Art Library
Reproduces fifty of Turner's works in color and twenty-seven in black and white to illustrate the dramatic vision asserted in his art
- GenresArt
96 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1977
4 people want to read
About the author
Jean Selz
40 books1 followerJean Selz (1904 - 1997) was a French art historian and critic & member of the International Association of Art Critics, Paris.
He authored Modern Sculpture: Origins and Evolution; Matisse; and many others.
He authored Modern Sculpture: Origins and Evolution; Matisse; and many others.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 29, 2025
We recognize a Turner picture right away despite the range of his styles during his creative lifetime: his delicate early pictures in watercolor or pencil (1787 to 1819), with their effortless architectural detail, and his exquisite pencil drawings of Scotland landscapes; the furiously brushed nearly abstract ocean scenes of the 1830s; his ethereal watercolor landscape sketches of the same year; the juxtaposition of movement and calm in his steam-filled oil painting of 1940 "Rain, Steam and Speed: The Great Western Railway." Turner seems to bridge or actually leap over time from the aesthetic austerity of the 1700s to the abstract expressionism of the 1940s and '50s.
Who is this guy, who seems so antiquated on one hand and so progressive on the other? Jean Selz attempts to answer such questions in this 1977 book, translated from French, which is part of the extensive Bonfini Press series that was later reprinted as the Crown Art Library. The book offers a compressed but very detailed biography of Turner and analysis of how his artistic vision expanded and came to prefigure styles and attitudes toward art and the artist that were later favored by Monet, in particular, and, I would add, based on my recent reading, by Degas and Cezanne.
Selz describes Turner's beginnings, his ambitions and early achievements, which includes Turner's youthful interest in drawing cathedrals in precise perspective, and his penchant for wandering the English countryside in search of interesting landscapes but also seeking out scenes in cities in England and Scotland, then farther afield in Paris, Rome and Venice, and yet onward to dramatic settings in Switzerland. His interest in landscapes is said to follow an English and Dutch tradition, but around 1800, when he aspired to become a member of the Royal Academy, he started painting scenes in the genre of "historical landscapes." Seltz suggests that Turner sought at that time to follow the examples of "Poussin for the allegorical landscapes, Claude Lorrain for landscape per se, and Van de Verde for seascapes," yet Turner continued to also create dramatic pictures of the Alps, river scenes, old castles and cathedrals, resulting in a collection of work without "thematic unity." Selz notes that the "only link between the plates (in Turner's 1807 book of engravings) is the author's graphic style." I think the latter is what we instantly recognize in any Turner picture.
For two decades Turner continued working in these parallel traditions of landscape and academic subjects while continuing his constant traveling, but Selz takes note of an innovation in Turner's 1823 oil painting "The Bay of Baiae with Apollo and the Sibyl." "The drawing of the landscape is not detailed; it is modeled by light colored masses. The details to which Turner had previously devoted himself are completely absent…. He has now set off on the road of a poetic conception of color which was to reach fruition several years later" (54).
His innovation was further developed in the 1829 painting "Ulysses Deriding Polyphmus," where "light from an extravagant sun seems to cause the explosion of the entire composition" (56). A critic of the time called the painting "an example of color in delirium." With the death of his father that same year, Turner's style moved into a mode that Turner called "colour beginnings." Selz suggests that "It is not absurd to think that respect for the father may be linked with a respect for tradition …. Now he was suddenly free of all filial bonds, and this liberty may have found its natural expansion in a spiritual independence favorable to the realization of his true personality" (62). His "true personality" is revealed by freeing himself from "draughtsmanship" in his watercolors. "He freed himself in the way in which Monet, some forty years later, was to conceive painting only in terms of his most fleeting visual impressions. Here Turner was the obvious precursor of Impressionism." His watercolors portrayed an "impalpable world that was nothing but shapes colored with light." The technique is "pushed so far in the direction of an abstraction that the subject cannot be defined. … No painter before Turner had given color such resolute autonomy" (70). Selz concludes that his innovation "was to make him the most daring and the greatest watercolorist of the nineteenth century" (71).
Near the end of his life, Turner continued to offer his pictures composed of shape and color (and texture), comprising a "dramatic vision," where his "romantic imagination, or rather the avatars of his imagination, adapted to his new pictorial conception, led him to transcend nature … and to impart to it an unwonted resonance which sometimes acquires the character of a grandiose, fantastic dream."
And how did his contemporaries judge these transcendent and nearly abstract pictures? Selz reports that "the masterpiece of this period, "Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway," of 1844, was "severely judged." Selz refers to the painting's "prophetic image of a future world, the world of machines, integrated harmoniously into Turner's musing vision of a landscape under rain. The smoke escaping from the locomotive is the gentle bond linking it with the sky." Selz concludes that the critics hardly understood what they were looking at. "Turner's importance was only very gradually recognized in England, and more gradually still outside his own country." Selz wonders which pictures of Turner's were seen by Monet and Pissarro in London in 1870, "but Monet's subsequent criticisms concerning Turner provide how much attention the French artist had paid to his painting" (93).
Selz's arguments help me understand Turner's background and his intentions, and his innovations, yet I wonder about valuing an artist's work and vision based on its precursor status, on how it may or may not have influenced later artists. He places Turner within a modernist perspective, as a pioneer of the attitudes and "isms" that would soon follow. I feel that there is more to the story of Turner's rather isolated vision. To learn more, I intend to read Turner: The Fifth Decade : Watercolours, 1830-1840 (Tate Gallery, 1992).
Selz's informative text is written in a convoluted style that sometimes dissolves into a list of Turner's many wanderings, but overall is a great introduction to Turner's life and work. Unfortunately, the (excellent) pictures in the book are not shown in chronological order which tends to undermine Selz's theories about Turner's progressively innovative vision.
Who is this guy, who seems so antiquated on one hand and so progressive on the other? Jean Selz attempts to answer such questions in this 1977 book, translated from French, which is part of the extensive Bonfini Press series that was later reprinted as the Crown Art Library. The book offers a compressed but very detailed biography of Turner and analysis of how his artistic vision expanded and came to prefigure styles and attitudes toward art and the artist that were later favored by Monet, in particular, and, I would add, based on my recent reading, by Degas and Cezanne.
Selz describes Turner's beginnings, his ambitions and early achievements, which includes Turner's youthful interest in drawing cathedrals in precise perspective, and his penchant for wandering the English countryside in search of interesting landscapes but also seeking out scenes in cities in England and Scotland, then farther afield in Paris, Rome and Venice, and yet onward to dramatic settings in Switzerland. His interest in landscapes is said to follow an English and Dutch tradition, but around 1800, when he aspired to become a member of the Royal Academy, he started painting scenes in the genre of "historical landscapes." Seltz suggests that Turner sought at that time to follow the examples of "Poussin for the allegorical landscapes, Claude Lorrain for landscape per se, and Van de Verde for seascapes," yet Turner continued to also create dramatic pictures of the Alps, river scenes, old castles and cathedrals, resulting in a collection of work without "thematic unity." Selz notes that the "only link between the plates (in Turner's 1807 book of engravings) is the author's graphic style." I think the latter is what we instantly recognize in any Turner picture.
For two decades Turner continued working in these parallel traditions of landscape and academic subjects while continuing his constant traveling, but Selz takes note of an innovation in Turner's 1823 oil painting "The Bay of Baiae with Apollo and the Sibyl." "The drawing of the landscape is not detailed; it is modeled by light colored masses. The details to which Turner had previously devoted himself are completely absent…. He has now set off on the road of a poetic conception of color which was to reach fruition several years later" (54).
His innovation was further developed in the 1829 painting "Ulysses Deriding Polyphmus," where "light from an extravagant sun seems to cause the explosion of the entire composition" (56). A critic of the time called the painting "an example of color in delirium." With the death of his father that same year, Turner's style moved into a mode that Turner called "colour beginnings." Selz suggests that "It is not absurd to think that respect for the father may be linked with a respect for tradition …. Now he was suddenly free of all filial bonds, and this liberty may have found its natural expansion in a spiritual independence favorable to the realization of his true personality" (62). His "true personality" is revealed by freeing himself from "draughtsmanship" in his watercolors. "He freed himself in the way in which Monet, some forty years later, was to conceive painting only in terms of his most fleeting visual impressions. Here Turner was the obvious precursor of Impressionism." His watercolors portrayed an "impalpable world that was nothing but shapes colored with light." The technique is "pushed so far in the direction of an abstraction that the subject cannot be defined. … No painter before Turner had given color such resolute autonomy" (70). Selz concludes that his innovation "was to make him the most daring and the greatest watercolorist of the nineteenth century" (71).
Near the end of his life, Turner continued to offer his pictures composed of shape and color (and texture), comprising a "dramatic vision," where his "romantic imagination, or rather the avatars of his imagination, adapted to his new pictorial conception, led him to transcend nature … and to impart to it an unwonted resonance which sometimes acquires the character of a grandiose, fantastic dream."
And how did his contemporaries judge these transcendent and nearly abstract pictures? Selz reports that "the masterpiece of this period, "Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway," of 1844, was "severely judged." Selz refers to the painting's "prophetic image of a future world, the world of machines, integrated harmoniously into Turner's musing vision of a landscape under rain. The smoke escaping from the locomotive is the gentle bond linking it with the sky." Selz concludes that the critics hardly understood what they were looking at. "Turner's importance was only very gradually recognized in England, and more gradually still outside his own country." Selz wonders which pictures of Turner's were seen by Monet and Pissarro in London in 1870, "but Monet's subsequent criticisms concerning Turner provide how much attention the French artist had paid to his painting" (93).
Selz's arguments help me understand Turner's background and his intentions, and his innovations, yet I wonder about valuing an artist's work and vision based on its precursor status, on how it may or may not have influenced later artists. He places Turner within a modernist perspective, as a pioneer of the attitudes and "isms" that would soon follow. I feel that there is more to the story of Turner's rather isolated vision. To learn more, I intend to read Turner: The Fifth Decade : Watercolours, 1830-1840 (Tate Gallery, 1992).
Selz's informative text is written in a convoluted style that sometimes dissolves into a list of Turner's many wanderings, but overall is a great introduction to Turner's life and work. Unfortunately, the (excellent) pictures in the book are not shown in chronological order which tends to undermine Selz's theories about Turner's progressively innovative vision.
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August 27, 2020It is through these eyes, closed forever at the bottom of the tomb, that generations as yet unborn will see nature.
I love art a lot, but I am not very well read in it. I have not studied it, or read a lot about it, yet I spend many hours of every day in front of a canvas with my oil paint, which undoubtedly is my preference. William Turner was a great artist who used many different mediums, watercolour and oil maybe the ones he's most famous for. Many would recognise the works of his later life as his typical style, with his abstract, atmospheric, big strokes, but not as many would recognise his earlier works as his. His earlier works being very detailed works telling stories from classic literature, and his transformation within the art is very rare for an artist to do so late in life, and this is mostly what this book chronicles. The way he transformed from a remarkable - though confirmative - painter, into something many Englishmen had never seen before. The writing style is very engaging, and you can almost feel Jean Selz's passion for art through the words in this book, and his admiration for Turner is as clear as day. This writing paired with the vibrant paintings of Turner made for a very enjoyable read. I will say though that it bothered me a little that most of the paintings he spoke about weren't in the book and if they were they weren't where he was speaking of it, so I very often had to look the paintings up on my own, which brought me out of the flow of reading. However this might have been done intentionally so that he would display almost the double amount of paintings as he otherwise might have.
He rose so high that the excessively rarefied air could not support his flight.
I love art a lot, but I am not very well read in it. I have not studied it, or read a lot about it, yet I spend many hours of every day in front of a canvas with my oil paint, which undoubtedly is my preference. William Turner was a great artist who used many different mediums, watercolour and oil maybe the ones he's most famous for. Many would recognise the works of his later life as his typical style, with his abstract, atmospheric, big strokes, but not as many would recognise his earlier works as his. His earlier works being very detailed works telling stories from classic literature, and his transformation within the art is very rare for an artist to do so late in life, and this is mostly what this book chronicles. The way he transformed from a remarkable - though confirmative - painter, into something many Englishmen had never seen before. The writing style is very engaging, and you can almost feel Jean Selz's passion for art through the words in this book, and his admiration for Turner is as clear as day. This writing paired with the vibrant paintings of Turner made for a very enjoyable read. I will say though that it bothered me a little that most of the paintings he spoke about weren't in the book and if they were they weren't where he was speaking of it, so I very often had to look the paintings up on my own, which brought me out of the flow of reading. However this might have been done intentionally so that he would display almost the double amount of paintings as he otherwise might have.
He rose so high that the excessively rarefied air could not support his flight.
January 13, 2025
Like the Beatles and the Beach Boys, I suspect Turner was driven by the independence of Constable.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews