MR. TURNER and Painting a Portrait of the Future of Existential Modernity

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON FEBRUARY 12, 2015

“What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it.  You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world.  You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.”  

- Morpheus, The Matrix

"My business is to paint what I see, not what I know is there."

 - J. M. W. Turner

MR. TURNER is a fascinatingly masterful film by the always brilliant English director Mike Leigh.  The film is a look at the life and work of the great British painter J. M. W. Turner.  The film is wonderfully acted by every single actor involved and the look of the film is breathtaking. Mr. Turner is truly a work of art in its own right, which in that regard lets its audience become aware of its respect for the artistry of its subject.

The film Mr. Turner follows “the painter of light” which Turner was commonly known as because of the beautiful sunsets he painted.  Early in his life he sketched and worked quite delicately and beautifully with water paint.  This talent for painting got him accepted into the Royal Academy of Arts in London.  He later moved on from water painting to oil and started painting these amazingly majestic landscape and sea canvases.  His father, William Turner worked with him mixing his paints and building his canvases.  When his father died this had a profound effect on Turner and his outlook on life and death which made its way into his paintings.

Turner became more subjugated from the people in the world around him.  He traveled to find new vistas and to revisit beloved old ones.  He visited brothels to sketch prostitutes and once had himself strapped high up to the mast of a ship during a massive snow storm at sea, so he could later accurately paint such a storm on canvas.  That particular incident gave him bronchitis which began a decline in his health that eventually led to his death in Chelsea, England in 1851.

Turner was not a soberly sane person which ended up being ideal for his craft.  Soberly sane people generally don’t make good artists in anything really.   The world’s great advances in creativity and invention were more often than not achieved by little encounters with madness.  This form of artistic madness can be destructive not only for the artist but for the poor people that are often in their company, but that is what is often required of the human mind navigating such a structured, controlled society in order to break itself free of the shackles of conformity.

Turner felt that there was something wrong with the world, like The Matrix quote from above, Turner felt it like a splinter in his mind.  He articulated this feeling on his canvases.  His marine paintings were pushing toward the edge of reality itself, where the existential angst of the coming modern machine world made it on his canvas.  Mankind at the time of Turner’s pivotal painting period was losing its religious solidarity.  Turner himself was at least agnostic during his life, forgoing the presence of God for the reality he was searching for in his paintings.  God was in the foreground for many centuries because people generally knew nothing about the natural world.  During Turner's time science was beginning to become just as much a part of life as religion.  For Turner and many other free thinking people, this started to push God to the background and in some cases, out of the picture entirely.  Instead of painting cathedrals he painted the Industrial Revolution as it unfolded.

"It is necessary to mark the greater from the lesser truth: namely the larger and the more liberal idea of nature from the comparatively narrow and confined; namely that which addresses itself to the imagination from that which is solely addressed to the eye."

 - J. M. W. Turner

The events leading up to the end of the film were at their most existential.  Death is coming for us all and as much rhyme or reason we might want to apply to it, it’s still coming.  This film sees us in our most naked form, spinning thousands of miles per minute in the bleak cold nothingness of the universe.  Turner tried to paint his way behind the curtain to see the truth like so many before him and so many after.  Like others though he became restricted by the very structure he was trying to escape.  The frames of his paintings were as far as he was permitted to go, where the poet is limited by the length of his page, Turner was only able to go so far.  This limitation though is where great art is born.  It’s because of these restraints that ideas hidden in the abyss of the mind can surface, and here the artist’s task is to diagnose them and articulate them in some form of creative expression. What Turner did do was pave the way for impressionism as well as abstract art, essentially launching Modern Art.  He not only painted beautiful landscapes and raging seas, he painted the wonders of science and progress, not necessarily optimistic progress but never the less progress.  He saw that mankind was on a bifurcating precipice and the times as he knew them would be changing forever.  He was born in the age of sail and died in the age of steam during the Industrial Revolution.

The great philosophers, poets, painters, psychologists and physicists all owe their work to those that came before them, and so the future generation will owe theirs to the present.  This work belongs to mankind; it’s a project to better understand ourselves and the space around us we all share.  Turner was a controversial figure during his time because he pushed at the walls of conformity.  Members of the aristocracy and royalty did not approve of many of his paintings, especially the final phase of his career where even his sinking ships and recognizable stormy seas were dissolving on his ghostly canvases, where his paint became quite free and loose blurring the land and horizon, leaving an impending hazy void that he subconsciously saw coming.

Turner’s long time housekeeper, who loved him dearly, was exploited by him sexually and was taken for granted.  She was for the most part, an object for him to use as he wished.  Once she discovered that Turner was living with a woman in Chelsea, she left heartbroken and after his death was left a drift.  Her life was structured around waiting hand and foot for Turner’s grumpy demands.  This defined her life and with him gone she no longer had any idea what to do with herself.  This has always been a tragedy for some people, where they devoted too much time towards the will of others and never really stopped to work on developing themselves. 

Turner’s relationship with the seaside landlady, Sophia Booth, who was a widower twice already, was certainly sad to see Turner die, but she lived on.  A perfect scene at the end of the film has her meticulously cleaning demarcated windows, recognizing life goes on and as such must be lived.  Unlike the hapless housekeeper, Sophia Booth was able to lose herself in structure and routine in order to carry on.  This is also a tragedy for some people where they cling to their things and their routines in order to avoid feeling the pain of loss.      

Society has become so structured that we no longer see the fine detail of it anymore.  If a double-decker city bus takes a busy London street corner at a fast speed, as they often do, the wannabe punk rocker standing on the sidewalk on that same corner, listening to the Sex Pistols through the re-mastered digital download on his iPhone, would barely blink an eye.  But if you were to remove the buildings, all the people, and other vehicles, placing him and the bus in an open field with the bus making the same maneuver, you might find that same bad ass punk-rocker soiling his leather pants.  The reason for this is the structure is an understood agreement in societies.  Without it, it would be just us alone in the world.  So the structure is our predictable Pavlovian maze trap that we as a member of society no longer see but yet require immensely.

J. M. W. Turner lived during a precarious time, where his contemporary Soren Kierkegaard developed existentialism, postulating that the anxiety we feel is the result of our total freedom to choose.  While the sodality of the church continued to proselytize people into believing what the church believes, many were looking to science for their answers about existence.  Alessandro Volta built the first electric battery and Pompeii was discovered at the base of Mount Vesuvius, which put an end to the frivolity of the Rococo Era ushering in Neoclassicism, which was a return to sterile academic form.  The Romantic Era followed as a philosophical and literary movement focused away from disciplines of the Neoclassics and more toward, feelings, emotions, introspection and atmosphere as mankind struggled against the forces of the natural world.   Turner became a vital figure in the art world and in how we look at ourselves while we look toward the horizon searching for the nature of reality.  Mr. Turner is a celebration of the artist's plight in life, the film is raw and as real as they come just as Turner would have wanted it.