Perspectives on Specs

Perspectives on Specs - The visual art gene skipped a generation in my family, from my mother and my sister to my kids. I have no aptitude at drawinag or painting - my artistic abilities are purely musical and, arguably, prose writing.

But my kids are both quite talented (and it's safe to say that they got as much of that from their mother as from my side). My son in particular loves art - he won the State Fair art show in his age bracket in 2002 for the most adorable sculpture I've ever seen.

So my kids are the visual artists - but I try. I'm particularly illiterate at the history of painting. Yet through the fog of my lack of knowledge of visual art, one artist has always stuck with me: J.M.W. Turner.

Turner was a key artistic manifestation of one of the most amazing confluences of art, science, engineering, philosophy and understanding of the world in history, from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to about 1835 - a period Paul Johnson called "The Birth of the Modern" in his book of the same name, a time when the precepts for many of the lynchpins of what we call the modern world were actually invented and popularized; things and ideas as diverse as the macadam road, steam power, indoor plumbing, pre-emption, trousers, romanticism, mass education, generalized wealth and popular concern for general welfare, the internal combustion engine...

...and in the case of Turner, the color yellow. Prior to Turner, the technology of pigmentation hadn't developed to the point where it could produce a genuine yellow paint; prodded by Turner, it did - and the new color in Turner's palette allowed him to pioneer the representation of light and the interplay of light and shadow and the atmosphere in a way that no artist before had. Turner's work was both realistic and intensely evocative, an achievement of both art and technology.

And, according to Charles Paul Freund, of overcoming disability:

Turner’s vision has been debated before, but [British eye surgeon and art buff James] McGill’s diagnosis is a specific one: The painter suffered some color blindness, affecting his reds and blues, and saw the world through cataracts. The latter would have resulted in his perceiving "exactly that effect of dazzling shimmering light we see in the paintings."

This, however, is a problem for some people.

Turner's style was, along with Byron's poetry, Shelley's prose and Beethoven's music, one of the founding pillars of Romanticism, the artistic tradition that eschewed the physical and empirical, and probably was most concisely stated by John Lennon - Byron, Shelley, Tchaikowskii and Thoreau would have probably felt "All you need is love" (fill in the unquantifiable, intangible human value of your choice) was a perfectly fine summation of the Romantic ideal. Later romantics and their descendents completed a separation of empirical and ethereal that would have horrified the likes of Turner, who saw the material, artistic and spiritual linked in ways that defied ideology.

Which is something both art and science need to rediscover.

If true, such a diagnosis would hardly diminish Turner; it would make his achievements more impressive, because he’d have chosen to make his disability a part of his method. Yet despite a wealth of suggestive case studies...the effort to understand art in terms of biology remains peripheral, and art remains locked in its Romantic cage.

If Turner did strive to make art from a clouded vision, his effort would have been one of intensifying intellectual engagement with the world, not of Romantic spiritual alienation from it. A Turner with fading sight would not have been trapped by biology; he would have been using his work to transcend it.

Read the whole thing, naturally. Posted by Mitch at March 3, 2004 06:30 AM