For this week's Southbank show, we've come upstream to London's Millbank.
Here on the north side of the Thames is the Tate Gallery, where the nation's collection
of British and 20th century art is on display.
We're here to celebrate the opening of the Claw Gallery, built to house the work of a
single artist who was, I think, the greatest painter Britain has produced, Joseph Mallord
William Turner.
This wing, in which are displayed for the first time together over 300 oil paintings
and 20,000 watercolours, drawings and engravings, will be opened by Her Majesty the Queen in
three days' time on April the 1st.
For we're being allowed to preview Turner's gallery, a privilege of which Turner, the
son of a barber who built his own gallery to show his work free to the public, might
have approved.
For this programme, we invited a range of people with a particular interest in Turner
to discuss the artist, taking as their starting point one of his paintings.
Why did the Tate need a new gallery for these paintings?
Well, there's been building up over the years a very strong feeling that Turner was a very
large-scale artist, someone who couldn't be satisfactorily represented by a miscellaneous
selection of pictures on the walls of the main collection.
And that was very much reinforced by the big bicentenary exhibition that we held at the
Royal Academy back in 1975.
And that sparked off a tremendous flood of public interest, not only in Turner as an
artist, but in the nature of his bequest to the nation and the way in which it ought to
be housed.
I was overawed to come into this museum just now.
It was just astonishing to at last to be able to see this work.
And if one thinks of Crome, Cotman, Bright, or Palmer, Richard Dadd, Constable Gainsborough,
William Blake, there are masses of genius.
And it, in a sense, makes me all the more sad that I can't see all of these artists
too displayed in the same way.
Because it's a very civilizing place.
Whatever is on our mind as we're approaching the gallery, you come in and somehow you're
more overawed even than if you're in a cathedral.
When the Turners were in the old part of the Tate, I never went into them.
I always passed them on the way to see the Pre-Raphaelite pictures to look at John Everett
Millay.
And I've never really liked the big late swirly sort of Turners.
So what I've done today is looked around, I looked around all those and didn't really
want to talk about any of those.
I've come up to the reserve collection and in fact chosen a little picture that's called
Moonlight, a study at Milbank, which is also very interesting because it would be the view
directly outside the Tate.
So obviously things have changed a great deal, but it's the same river, it's the same water.
And that rather fascinated me.
And it's such a simple little picture with just the moon and the reflection.
In painting in general, it's the precise that I like.
I've always veered towards a sort of a technical precision in painting.
So it's John Everett Millay.
I prefer most of all.
So I've really never looked at Turner.
I've never been interested in that kind of looser style.
Simply as a, I suppose the kind of painting I do is rather tight, therefore that's the
kind of painting I've tended to look at.
But a little picture like this is so beautiful.
I mean, it's so simple and atmospheric that it's a magnificent little picture.
My pictures I give and bequeath unto the trustees of the National Gallery, provided only that
they be kept together and preserved in a building to be used expressly and solely for that purpose.
To be known as Turner's Gallery, whose object will be to keep my pictures as a collection
of my work and to be seen by the public gratuitously.
On the face of it, it's taken 136 years for this to happen, which seems rather a long
time even by English standards.
Could you tell us why it's taken so long?
Well the money in his estate was never intended to go to the nation.
It was divided among various charities, particularly the establishment of alms houses for indigent,
male, legitimate English painters.
And that was Turner's greatest aim really.
But he also wanted to see his work housed with the great masters of the past in the
National Gallery.
And by the terms of his last codicil, the final form of his will, the hundred finished
pictures from his studio were to go to the National Gallery.
But since his family and other people contested the terms of the will, they thought they should
get the money.
In the end the alms houses were never built, the money went to the relations and not just
the hundred finished pictures but everything in his studio that he had painted or drawn
went to the nation.
The National Gallery was understandably slow to cope with this colossal administrative
problem, these hundreds of pictures and thousands of drawings.
But all through the 19th century they tried hard to show what they could.
And in 1910 when the National Gallery's British collection had moved here to Milbank, Sir
Joseph Duveen built some stunning galleries which are still here and where Turner's been
shown ever since.
Very satisfactory I would say.
What value would you put on this collection in the Cloer Gallery today with 300 oils,
200,000?
Well I think that's, you know, there's only one way you could do that and that's by selling
them and that is not feasible but I mean a picture by Turner has fetched seven million
pounds.
And if you multiply that by 300 that's over two billion isn't it?
Yes but I mean also a picture a year after that, a small perfectly genuine early picture
only fetched 12,000 pounds so that's got a very wide range between 12,000 and seven million.
But I suppose there must be 20 pictures in this gallery which must be worth 10 million
pounds each or more.
So that's 200 million.
There must be, I think the safest thing is to say hundreds of millions of pounds really.
He came from a barber shop down a dark entry off Covent Garden near the Piazza.
Just down the road was the Strand and the Leitermann and the river which he spent a
lot of time on and down the river was London, the Pool of London at London Bridge with the
Forest of Masts, all sailing ships of course.
And that's where he grew up and of course he was a cockney.
He had a cockney accent.
He thought like a cockney and spoke like a cockney.
His father was five foot nothing.
In fact he was a talkative little barber who was always spinning up on his feet on his
toes to talk to people because he was so small.
And Turner was the same.
And at 14 Turner was sent to the Royal Academy schools.
He got in, he passed the test.
At 21 he had his first oil painting hung there.
It was original.
It was a sea piece, fishermen and their boats but it was not at sun, not in daylight but
in moonlight.
And at 24 he was elected the youngest age you could be elected associate member of the
Royal Academy, ARA, and he had arrived.
He was drawn by George Dance who drew all the academicians and he even drew and set
up his own self-portrait and painted himself in oils.
A very rare thing because he was so self-conscious that he wouldn't allow ever afterwards anybody
to do his portrait.
He explained why to one of his friends.
He said people seeing my likeness will say such a little fellow as this can never draw.
Conditions were right at the time in the early 19th century for an artist's gifts and temperament.
The Royal Academy was established, British art had come of age or the British school
had come of age and at the same time it was a very open society for good and ill that
the individual was very much on his own.
And Turner had these fantastic individual human resources.
He had this amazing energy, this sort of organizing ability and he flourished in this in a sense
almost chaotic atmosphere and he had the power to do that.
And there is the, it is the range of his art which is so striking.
I mean his art is almost one might say as wide as society itself and of course as wide
as the Europe that he knew, I mean and what one sees, one sees nature, one sees the sky,
mountains, water and then you see agriculture, industry, buildings and all kinds of about
indeed war, peace, all kinds of the whole range of human beings as well.
And he allied all this of course with amazing technical skill, marvelous taste in terms of
color and light effects and transitions of tone and all that kind of thing but which
doesn't go with a sort of, like a kind of rococo chic because it's something very individual
and this too I think gives one this sense of the great genius and it's worth perhaps
saying that I think that Turner and one or two other artists of his generation were the
first British landscapists to be recognized as men of genius.
Life was pretty miserable at Maiden Lane to be quite honest because of his mother.
His mother was mad or going mad.
She had an ungovernable temper people said and it began like that but it got worse and
obviously she was mentally disturbed and by the time he was 25 he and his father had to
commit her to a mental hospital called the Bethlem Hospital which popularly became known
as Bedlam.
But he was hardly ever at home because he began traveling from an early age and his
travels Turner's travels were heroic.
I mean by the end of his life when he had gone from the tip of Scotland and Highlands
of Scotland right down to the southern tip of Italy people calculated he had done a good
hundred thousand miles in those days and he had filled over 300 sketchbooks.
When Turner was 22 years old he came on his first visit to north of England.
He traveled through Derbyshire and Yorkshire Dales round Northumberland and the Tweed Valley
finally crossing over the Pennines into the Lake District where we see this scene of Buttermeer.
It's called Buttermeer Lake and that's the fact we've got really Buttermeer, two lakes.
But this foreground lake is Cromack Water and only a bit of Buttermeer you can see is
under the lit up portion by the rainbow.
But Turner was out more to paint his feelings about the Lake District scene rather than
the pure topography.
It wasn't the case of making a map of the scenes he would say.
He hated his picture to be mappy.
So this picture really is more poetic and his love of poetry is felt by the fact that
he used for the caption in the Royal Academy catalogue which they were allowed in that
year 1798 to quote a piece of Thomson's poetry.
So this is a quotation from the seasons of Thomson out of spring.
The grand ethereal bow is showing rising there unfolding every hue of color.
In other words this is the main aspect of the picture.
And it has foreshadowing Turner's great love of nature and the way that he could interpret
nature as he got older.
In other words he was a painter really of stress and nature and the state of flux as
the gallery will show with the great storms of Hannibal and the great avalanches, the
fires at sea, the burning of houses of parliament.
He's an epic painter and this is really showing you as a young man how wonderful this genius
is going to develop.
The Royal Academy was really Turner's family.
That's how he saw it.
But the great days at the Royal Academy in those days were the varnishing days.
They called them varnishing days but really they were painting days.
Three or four days before the annual exhibition opened everybody's picture was hung on the
wall.
They knew where it was going to be and they were allowed to finish it.
Well Turner practically started it as well as finishing it on the wall.
And he was famous for doing this.
People would come just to watch him do it.
This little figure standing on a bench or on a box in order to reach it.
Turner was a very canny man as far as money was concerned, as far as reputation was concerned.
Realized the two were inextricable.
And so he always trod a very formal line with the Academy.
The presentation pictures of this kind, always with a classical base, always with a reference
to the kind of grand old master everyone would accept.
This particular example is pure Claude for example.
It's 200 years back in terms of composition and lighting and everything.
Because what you needed to do at the Academy was to keep a kind of formal foot forward.
Everybody saying, oh yes, here's a grand man in the classical tradition.
What Turner did privately, he ran his own gallery just off Harley Street, was to present
rather less formal pictures so that you had two sides of Turner running at the same time.
I was just riveted by this painting.
I call a painting modern, it's not necessarily a relevant remark, but the fact is that both
Turner and Constable, and we have of course two equally immensely great painters, were
fantastically revolutionary.
And it was 60 years before the French, the surfaces of French Impressionist painting
really took their cue from.
It's the breaking up of surfaces.
But I seem to realize that until Turner and Constable started painting like this, and
this is reasonably early, I think it's 1807, but until that happened, nearly all painting
that you can possibly think of from the Renaissance on had been a matter of creating the illusion
of continuous smooth, almost shiny surfaces, continuous surfaces.
This breaking up into these facets which are created by a brush stroke apiece.
Each one is each, the brush strokes here are so fresh, they could have been put on yesterday.
I mean here's this, whatever it is, this chap on the back here, there are three touches
with a very small brush which has got yellow on the underside and ochre on the top put
on just like that.
The side of that house is one brush stroke.
This bridge has been painted with a series of tiny brush strokes all going down like
that.
They're overlapping, it's a brilliant device because in fact you read it as a perfectly
symmetrical architectural statement.
It is a moment of extraordinary revolutionary inventiveness and I mean the idea that the
English can't produce the greatest painting in the world.
Once we've had Constable and Turner, there's absolutely no reason for anybody to feel ashamed
of being English again.
These pictures, I think perhaps partly because they have no frames, which is a great help,
seem to me to be the final perfection, if one could put it like that, of Turner's art.
He had spent a lifetime painting from nature, painting pictures in emulation of other artists.
He painted like Titian, he painted like Claude, he even tried to paint like Poussin at one
time.
He eventually, I think with these two extraordinary pictures of Venice when he was a very old
man, joined the ranks of the very greatest artists who ever lived because the remnants
of all he'd learned, these sort of traces of all he'd learned, had finally liberated
him so that he who couldn't ever really draw the figure no longer needed to.
He who had found the description of the precise details of nature, which he did very well
as a young man, no longer necessary.
He who had painted so many pictures of Venice, of which the room in which these pictures
hang is full, finally was able to paint two extraordinary images which are not nostalgic.
They are infinitely romantic because they are not trapped at any moment of time.
They might just as well be the Venice that you're going to look at when you next go there
as the Venice that Turner himself remembered.
Paint, which he'd used for so many different, perhaps extraneous reasons ultimately, had
become completely his ally as an artist.
So any mark that he made, any thickening of the paint, any transparency, any tiny little
smudge or nudge to the painted surface became light, air, figures, and somehow became the
world itself.
Well I have the distinction of living down the same road as Turner.
I live in Chaney Walk in Chelsea and it overlooks the river.
When I get up in the morning and I pull back my curtains, I see the same river that inspired
Turner and I can see why he was so interested in light and mists and color because every
day the river is different.
Some days it's silver, some days it's gold and grays and greens.
It's always a different thing there and he loved painting water.
And I've chosen this picture here called Sea Monster.
I don't think this is the Thames actually, but this is the nearest thing I can find being
a caricaturist to my work in a way.
He has depicted here a monster which is emerging from the mists and it's a strange picture
for Turner really.
He's gone outside his usual brief here and used his imagination.
And I'm not quite sure where he got the idea of a sea monster because it's something he
must have delved into his own imagination for.
And in general he relied on the landscape or the world around him which he created in
his own form in his pictures.
But this can only have come from his mind.
Maybe he was just doing a seascape and suddenly this thing began to emerge as monsters do
from the normal environment.
Perhaps it was the figment of his imagination which took place in oil on the paper.
Turner took advantage of a permission which the Royal Academy allowed and that was that
a quotation could be placed in the catalogue to go with the picture.
And really to make sense of this picture the quotation should be with it.
And it is from Milton's Paradise Lost.
Turner's lines are, Turner's choice of lines are significant and they are, ye mists and
exhalations that now rise from hill or steaming lake, dusky or grey, till the sun paints your
fleecy skirts with gold.
In honour to the world's great author, rise.
And you can see that the picture in first glance is about rising.
You go right up the picture, you fall into the light above the halfway mark into a valley
and then find yourself suddenly falling even higher into another valley above.
And you can see all the fleecy gold being sort of a motif.
But then you become aware that there's images of fall in a very literal sense.
A waterfall is placed in the foreground of the picture.
And Turner's added to that a kind of movement downwards with a horse and wagon which has
no body in control of it.
But just the sense that you're going down into the dark.
And like all romantics they're not really interested in heaven and hell, they're interested
in the opposition between dark and light.
But the clue to the whole picture is that when you go close to the flock of sheep, which
is like the middle earth where all of us live, where the matter of fact life is going on,
and you find that the shepherds are in fact not two men but a man and a woman.
And then you suddenly realise that Turner has taken the great leap of making it just
literally paradise.
And that's what gives it its excitement for me.
Certainly during the formative years of the company, Turner's work played quite a substantial
part in the development.
For example, a few years ago the company's catalogue had this painting of the Chain Pier
Brighton featured on its cover.
We found in the past that Turner's work, although it sold in many thousands when reproduced
in print form, and in particular a subject called the Fighting Temeraire sold in very
large quantities, these sales really were in England.
We had the Battle of Trafalgar, this painting, the Chain Pier Brighton, and the Fighting
Temeraire.
In order of sales preference I think the most popular undoubtedly was the Fighting Temeraire.
I think the second popular was Chain Pier Brighton and third the Battle of Trafalgar.
This really is a cracking picture.
What fascinates me as a student and as a painter is how he has held it all together as a unit
community, how he has held the whole composition together as a single entity.
I think he has built it out of areas of light and dark, so I'm using those as building blocks.
I think your eye goes in from here, between the contrast between the light and dark here,
through to the subject which is a sort of cart crossing the stream.
But then you come out again here and up to this bit of bank here and throughout again
here all the time working light against dark, dark against light.
I was quite shocked when I came in here and saw this in the original for the first time
because in the reproduction it's in reverse, it's all the other way around.
So it really took me aback of it, I couldn't believe it.
It's in one of the major volumes on Turner too.
The thing to remember is Turner basically originally was a watercolour painter and he
felt happiest in producing a translucency, a translucent effect.
He was always looking for this in his oil paintings.
This often resulted in him using many layers which didn't dry at the same rate and therefore
produced cracks and problems of the paint not binding together.
I have here a photograph which was taken in 1956 when it was at the National Gallery and
this is basically the same state it was in up to about a year ago.
And you can see that it has very definite crackles along the skyline and going into
the clouds and coming down into the sea.
And it was in these areas that one gradually reduced these striations.
The other thing to note in this picture is the frame which is original to the painting
which was shown in the Royal Academy and we have now taken a slightly more historic viewpoint
of the frame and this has been cleaned and not re-gilded but left as in the state it
is but it's cleaned to become a harmonious whole with the painting.
I've chosen a painting by Turner which is known as the Snowstorm.
It's a picture which was lampooned and this lampooning upset Turner enormously in his
own lifetime.
It was described as being nothing but a load of soap suds and whitewash.
He was in touch with cosmic forces almost like a sage let's say and was for example
I think he would turn up at private functions at the Royal Academy and so forth in working
trousers covered in paint and everyone just thought he was an oddball.
But you can understand that there is a place for such people whose minds are so far somewhere
else they just don't have the time of day for normal ritual.
And I think this does express, it is the picture where in which he captured the scene while
he was lashed to the mast for four hours and that's an incredible stance for any human
being to take to live through a storm and he didn't expect to survive actually and to
come out of it and to make some attempt at depicting these forces at play.
It moves, it precedes tashism and action painting and all these things and you can see the painting
swirls with all kinds of movements.
It's almost cubist the way that there are apparent lines dividing the picture up.
It's a picture in which there is just nothing but emotion and energy.
It's a tremendous thing.
Turner became reclusive and he hid himself away.
Why was it that he got no royal commissions?
Why was it he was never knighted?
Practically every artist of note in the Academy was knighted but not Turner the greatest because
Queen Victoria was certain he was mad.
She told, I mean George V told Kenneth Clarke, he was walking around the National Gallery
he said of course Trouble Turner, he's mad.
I mean my grandmother said so.
I've chosen this painting because it seems to have an enormous paradox in it which I'm
very partial to.
It's quite sinister and there's a kind of brooding dark force developing in it and frightened
animals and certainly a feeling that something awful is about to happen but at the same time
the light is coming through and is there in the background.
I think a lot of Turner's paintings have that kind of paradox in them, this one especially.
I think that the repetition of this kind of theme says something about him because it
appears in quite a few of the paintings.
A very transcendent light that is accompanied by very dark forces at work.
Sometimes they're black as with this painting, sometimes you find these kind of bloody sunsets
appearing in it.
It certainly would suggest to me that he lived very close to that sense of paradox in life.
That there's some kind of yearning or hope or faith in a divine intelligence whether
one sees it as God or one sees it as within human beings but also he seems to have been
very aware of how easy it is for destruction to be unleashed.
What that says about his personality I'm not sure.
He certainly seems to have perched right in the middle of a very difficult ambivalence
that many people find intolerable.
I think it's very interesting in the context of romantic landscape how much Turner can
express in a simple scene of what to him were everyday things, a ship, small sailing ships,
setting sun appear, some sand, some waves and it has the most marvellous mood of cold
dawn with the sun that's really the only touch of colour in the whole picture.
Very cleverly expressed by the way he's just left a band across it to show that his ship
shining out through clouds.
This is an unfinished picture.
He never exhibited this in the Royal Academy.
Later on he did a picture rather like it called Fort Vimeo which showed a battleship being
fired on off the French coast.
But in this case because it's in the same format as a whole group of pictures painted
at Petworth one likes to think of it as an English coastal scene.
In fact if you turn it into a French coastal scene it turns into a sunset rather than a
sunrise which would destroy a lot of my feeling for the painting.
Yes this is a very interesting painting because it's so unusual in that most of his paintings
are either landscapes or seascapes.
This is an interior painting.
It's actually a painting, Music Party Eastcastle Castle painted in 1835 and it's a society
painting of the type of places that he used to visit.
It's got a musical and artistic connection.
And it's very interesting also because he was noted for his interest in light and there
is the symbolism here of lightness and darkness.
And I think the real interest for us is the musical connection.
We're sponsoring the first in a series of music concerts in the Clore Gallery.
Music in the period of Turner and of course rather like his paintings.
It's a very rich period for composers.
If you look at this drawing room here what's remarkable about it is there's so little furniture
in it. The 18th century they didn't like to clutter things up.
By the end of the century that whole room would have been filled with bric-a-brac.
But there you see the very classical lines of a drawing room.
You see the French influence and then underneath here is the library with the piano.
The detail there is so beautiful and it gives you such a feeling of being in a library.
We've had plenty of interiors of this period and of other periods.
But what is so rare is to have an interior done by somebody who also happened to be a
genius and this is what makes these so special.
And over here which is an interesting little picture of an artist at work at Petworth.
Lord Egremont filled the house with children, mainly his own, and artists.
And here we see someone at work on a portrait and here with the finished product or a finished
product.
And here again you see that wonderful eye for colour, for shape, and you get the feeling
of the interior of a great house at the height really of a gracious living.
The end of the 18th century, although in fact painted just at the first part of the 19th.
I chose this painting when I was looking for ideas for my current collection.
Why I chose it, I particularly like the shapes of the buildings, the details of the buildings,
the black and white of these strong shapes of the gondolas, the colour in the sky against
the salmon pink.
When I first saw this painting I thought Turner was in his early 20s because it looked so
young but in fact he was about 60 when he painted it.
After seeing this painting I just had to go to Venice for myself but coming back and seeing
this painting again, Turner's view of Venice is much better than going there to see it
for yourself because he's actually moved back this building so you can see the excitement
that's going on in the canal.
The strong shapes, I used the black and white as colours and I used the shapes of the gondolas
into prints and just generally the feeling, a Venetian feeling.
It's a picture really with about 47 years of painting experience in it.
It's the kind of painting which critics didn't like at all.
Somebody said Turner's paintings were of nothing and very like.
Constable talked about Turner using tinted steam.
I mean I think it's a marvellous picture, it's so modern, it's so wonderfully painted.
It's all this wonderful colour, it is nothing in a sense but my god, colour, light, it's
everything which a lot of modern art is about.
I mean I wonder if Turner were alive now for the opening of this place.
He was going round to Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh through the modern collection.
I wonder what he'd have to say about it all.
This picture takes me right through to Monet, to the late Monets.
Monet made a marvellous, several marvellous paintings of the Thames, Westminster, of the
fog and the mist straight out of Turner.
And when Monet died about 1926, Rothko, Mark Rothko was born in America, he started painting
in 1926 and this even takes us through into Rothko.
That picture in a sense would not look out of date or out of place if it had been done
by a young artist today and was just being exhibited as a new work.
As relatives of Turner we are extremely fond of the sea, we are seafaring folk and this
has one of these pictures therefore, well all his seascapes are particularly, we admire
enormously but our grandfather sailed the home and Turner we think came to love the
sea through going down to Ulfricum when he was a boy and was probably studying those
breakers down there.
And so Ross Turner's father and grandfather, well they also were great seafarers too.
That's right, well of course his grandpa really was the great sea captain going around the
Cape of Goodhorn, Cape of Hull and of course we've chosen this picture because it really
does show Turner at his best with seascapes.
It is so dramatic, we've got the drama there of the ship and the men there all in great
detail yet at the same time he throws at you the storm, you've got the dark sky and the
fierce sea enveloping all these poor men who are endeavouring to save.
Of course my cousin and I are both very proud to be able to claim to be relatives of the
late J.M.W. Turner and I would just like to conclude with some of the last words that
he said which I think are rather appropriate.
He said that upon his death it is through these eyes closed forever at the bottom of
the tomb that generations as yet unborn will see nature.
There are so many aspects to Turner that I think that you have to remember that Turner
plodded quite steadily from the beginning of his career right to the very last exhibited
pictures this formal academic path year after year after year and yet at the same time he
was presenting pictures which became freer and freer.
This kind of picture tended to get critical acclaim.
The picture that was his more private, evocative, personal observation tended to be blasted
by the critics and it was really only Raskin coming in very late in Turner's life, Raskin
very young but earlier influential as an East Eat and a man who could promote a reputation
who really made late Turner intelligible to a general audience at all.
He had some properties in Wapping which he had inherited and he knocked two or three
cottages together and made them into a pub.
The fact that Turner had this property at Wapping and used to spend weekends there actually
turned out to be the biggest shock of Raskin's life because when he was going through the
boxes and boxes of drawings he had this unpleasant surprise.
One day he said I came across a portfolio filled with painting after painting of the
most shameful sort.
My hero used to go down to Wapping on a Friday and lived there till Monday with the sailors'
women painting them in every posture of abandonment and eventually he came to the conclusion with
the agreement of the director of the National Gallery that they should all be burned.
Now Raskin was the worst man you could have asked to have made this discovery.
He had plenty of sexual hang ups himself.
His own marriage was never consummated and he was appalled.
Jim Sterling is probably Britain's most well known architect but strangely enough he's
more known abroad where he's built such galleries as the Stuttgart Gallery which has more visitors
than any other gallery in Germany for instance, in the States where he has built a building
in Harvard for the museum again, the Fogg and numerous other buildings so he's really
quite well known outside this country both in the general field of architecture and for
building museums so he was a very logical person to select I think for the Tate.
The galleries had to be an extension of the existing Tate but at the same time they had
to be an independent building so you have the situation here where we have the garden
entrance to the new building but also the public coming from the existing Tate can walk
through at the same level so the building is both an extension and a new building.
There are spaces in the building which are absolutely deferential to the paintings, the
galleries, there the background is very calm, very subdued, there's no colour, it's all
sort of a suppressed background.
There are other spaces in the building where there's no art, the entrance hall, the lecture
theatre, the reading room and in those spaces they're more architectural, there's colour,
there's changes of scale, there's architectural distractions and I think that's quite permissible
and it does give the building a sort of identity.
The trustees are extremely happy with the building and so I believe is the Clore Foundation
who paid for the building.
Of course it's only a quarter of the overall plan, we have three further buildings at the
back of this, there's a wonderful sculpture courtyard on the front, there's a great courtyard
to be completed here, it's all part of a complex because so many people come nowadays
to visit museums, more and more, millions and millions of people come.
As far as its success, I think there is criticism, there's always criticism, there's tremendous
criticism of Turner, people said what is this painting about, what is all this colour and
movement across the canvas, why aren't there little people, little trees, little boats
and so on and the answer now can be seen is that he was in a sense like all great masters
ahead of his time.
If we didn't actually accept advance we should all still be living in caves, if we just copied
the past we'd be still caves.
This study room here in the Clore Gallery is a new facility where the public at large
are welcome to come and look at all the works on paper in the Turner Bequest which is of
very much larger concern of course than just the 300 oil paintings in the display outside.
So we hope that it will provide pleasant intimate surroundings in which people can look at these
remarkable works, sketchbooks, drawings, magnificent finished watercolours, the whole range of
his output.
In a lot of respects this magnificent view of smugglers of Folkestone is a watercolour
that appeals to me particularly because it seems to sum up in a lot of ways Turner's
greatest loves and interests.
He was fascinated by all the activities of the sea coast just as his paintings reflect
every aspect of human life and human experience so his watercolours very often dredge deep
into the significance of particular places.
They're not just views of towns or villages, they are discussions of the way of life that
characterises those places.
This particular drawing is unusual in that it shows us how he set about an academic duty
of his which was giving a series of lectures on perspective to the students at the Royal
Academy.
He took those duties very seriously and he worked very hard studying all the standard
texts and treatises on the subject of perspective and because of course in those days there
were no coloured slides or anything like that he made the most wonderful drawings, sometimes
very large, watercolours and diagrams illustrating the points that he wanted to make.
But here we can see that he's drawing his students' attention to various aspects of
the geometry of the perspective that the subject deals with.
This is ostensibly a view on the air with Kirkstall Abbey, a traditional picturesque
subject.
But in fact Kirkstall Abbey is a long way in the background and what we actually see
is a lock on a canal rather than the river itself which is somewhere away.
So it's an example of Turner's idiosyncratic way of choosing the subjects that suited him
rather than the ones that he thought his public would expect.
And we can also see from this example how marvellously his technique was up to the reduced
scale to cramming a lot of information, a lot of atmosphere, a lot of human activity
into this very small space.
This is one of the stunning drawings that Turner made in connection with his series
of views on the great rivers of Europe which was another project of the 1820s.
And here you can see it's a much freer drawing because the design was never brought to the
stage of which it would have to be engraved.
This is a mere study, an idea, a thought that flits through his mind.
It's dashed down in this marvellous sweep of crimson and yellow, an astonishing achievement.
It seems to sum up Turner's vision.
It's easy to believe that he might have done a drawing like this actually in situ.
I can't imagine anybody taking a pot of paints into a crowded theatre but that's the feeling,
the intimacy, the sense of the impact of the theatrical moment.
And I feel that that in a way sums up a great deal of Turner's art.
It's highly theatrical.
It's a marvellous, sudden, dramatic image which he wants us all to participate in.
I think the real legacy of Turner is his actual paintings to begin with.
I think they are so good, they are so varied, they are so rich, but basically they are so
good that one doesn't need to look any further.
He has of course influenced other artists but perhaps less than some people say.
He's always called the precursor of the Impressionists but his intentions were totally different.
I think he encouraged Impressionists, particularly those that came over in 1870 at the time of
the Franco-Prussian War, because they suddenly realised that you didn't have to be very meticulous,
you didn't have to paint everything in great detail.
And here was an artist who was revered in England who had got away with painting in
a very Impressionistic, to use the word in a very general sense, in a very Impressionistic
way.
Other 20th century artists have been influenced by him.
But he doesn't have an influence, you can't trace a line of great artists anyway in the
way that say you can trace a line of artists influenced by William Blake and Samuel Palmer.
There are some rather minor artists that you can actually say, well he's been looking too
hard at Turner.
But I think really his achievement is what he actually painted.
That's what this gallery is all about.
Do you think that this collection here of 300 oil paintings, 20,000 watercolours and
grivings and so on, is decently, properly, adequately representative of Turner?
No.
And that really does have to be the answer.
Here within the confines of this gallery the answer is no.
What's missing then?
What is missing are the really stunning pictures.
And there are stunning pictures scattered all over the world.
If you really wanted to serve a service to Turner, you pull together the best.
You do not put on view permanently the worst.
Much of this is material that was, as it were, studio sweeping.
There are pictures which were left unfinished because he realised at an early stage that
they were unfinishedable.
Not because they were so beautiful in that unfinished state, but because he couldn't
resolve the problems that he'd set himself.
Well, it's odd you should say that because I find that one of the attractions of the
collection, particularly in the reserve rooms upstairs, which look, which take their colour,
the wall colour from the artist's own studio and feel as if you're going into an artist's
studio and once one gets the catalogue so you can find out exactly what's going on,
the idea of half-finished works, works begun and abandoned and that's works in process,
works leading to other works and then the finished work.
I find that rather attractive than anything else.
As an argument I'm perfectly prepared to accept, but I think nevertheless that without the
very best pictures here and the very best pictures are absent, you are dealing with
a level of achievement which is below the real Turner.
We've had the fauve paintings of Matisse in 1905, 1907.
Here is a fauve sky.
Here is a tree of a slightly later Matisse period.
Here is a depositing with a knife of pigment, some white with some blue smeared in it and
some dark ultramarine that's slightly indigo left there absolutely functional in its pictorial
sense but I mean if you simply look at this area alone it could be almost any important
non-figurative painting of the last part of the present century.
The extraordinary fluidity and freshness, the way in which the making of the painting
is itself left totally invisible, that itself is something which we're attuned to this now
but in fact Turner was perfectly content with this.
I don't care if nobody's going to tell me that the so-called sketches are in any way
not intended.
Everything here gave him total satisfaction and the fact that it absolutely chimes with
our own thoughts and feelings about painting is simply something that one has to respond
to.
I see no way around this.
It's an extraordinary, it's extraordinary in tune with one's contemporary feelings about
the way paintings are made and the state in which they are reached completion and as such
I mean this is a fauve painting almost exactly a hundred years before its time.
It is these extraordinary, it's these extraordinary equations which really should be considered
consciously now.
He seemed so often, quoted so often as the precursor of the Impressionists and in fact
when you look even at the freest of Turner's Impressionism isn't the next step at all.
It seems to me that Turner was one of his individual geniuses like Botticelli who hit
upon a line of development that nobody else could follow and he was aware and off on his
own and at the end of his life the general's sort of critical acclaim was well he has a
great painter but we find this kind of greatness very elusive, very difficult to understand,
very difficult to pin down and so 19th and mid-19th century painting in England was rather
plodding after that.
There is no connection whatever with French painting.
Nobody took it on.
The real followers for Turner are people like the members of New England Art Club around
about 1900 who took on from the Thames sketches done in 1807.
You have a whole century before anything that you could really say was Turner's influence
begins to happen.
There are obviously a lot of ways in which you can retrospectively see aspects of his
work that anticipate impressionism, expressionism, abstraction, even cubism possibly, all sorts
of things but I would say that however interesting it is to see him in those terms it's actually
completely to misinterpret what he was about.
He was much more concerned with developing the tradition of the old masters that he really
admired and grafting himself onto the existing threads of British art, of European art.
So how would you describe his reputation?
His reputation has always been very high.
He's always been admired as an innovator, a very original genius, sometimes to the point
of being eccentric or even mad but I think that he needs to be seen more as the culmination
of the great classic tradition of European landscape painting rather than as the beginning
of something new.
He was famous, he was rich but he wasn't understood.
He was totally misunderstood and so he drew into himself, he hoarded his paintings, he
tried to buy them back and all the object of keeping them together, his children and
one day he knew it would take a long time.
One day if they were all kept together and then given to the nation and shown in a special
gallery such as this one, he felt the day would come when they were understood.