After Gaudí, comes Turner. The Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC) is leaving the pandemic behind with major exhibitions that delve into colossal and universal figures. And, furthermore, it does so in collaboration with museums of the stature of the Musée Orsay ---where the exhaustive exhibition on the most international Barcelona architect is currently being shown---, and the Tate. Hand in hand with the British gallery, the MNAC has put together Turner: Light is Color, an exhibition that can be visited until September 11 and that highlights Joseph Mallord William Turner's (1775-1851) fascination with nature and meteorological and atmospheric phenomena through a hundred paintings, watercolors, drawings, and engravings. This international projection will continue in the summer with the work of the Bolognese Carracci, which will come from the Museo del Prado and then continue its tour at the Palazzo Barberini.
Turner: Light is Color is the first exhibition that the MNAC dedicates to the landscape painter par excellence, an artist who has been seen little in Barcelona and has only come on a couple of occasions with the La Caixa Foundation. Despite this, the museum has not dedicated a chronological or retrospective exhibition to him, emphasizes its director, Pepe Serra, but has devised an immersive journey through his work through different thematic areas, such as memory, scene, or atmosphere, and covering from his beginnings in the 1790s to the late 1840s.
"This exhibition wants to reclaim Turner as a painter of nature and its elements, but, above all, as the great painter of light," defends its curator, David Blayney Brown, former chief curator of Historic British Art at the Tate. Interested in the effects of light, which can create anything and, at the same time, make it disappear, his recurring protagonists were elements such as the first rays of sun, moving clouds, storms, waves breaking forcefully, rainbows emerging after a storm, or mist. He also reflected the effects of incipient industrialization, with steam, smoke, and pollution dirtying the sky, as seen in Jetty, with a Steamboat at Sea in the Distance. And, among so much landscape, his affection for Venice is surprising, with different approaches that highlight its vivacity.
His devotion to light also translated into a fascination with darkness. "There is no light without darkness," Brown recalls. For this reason, one of the exhibition rooms is dedicated to his less luminous paintings and sketches, such as Buttermere Lake, with part of Cromackwater, Cumberland, a Shower. Despite this weakness, the sun was always his great protagonist and serves as the finale for the exhibition, made up of five oil paintings. Some scholars have interpreted his representation of the great star as self-portraits.
The exhibition rescues some of the sketches that the artist used to remember what he had experienced and to experiment with new techniques, private material that he donated upon his death to the British Government and that he did not expect to be seen or analyzed in the future. The sketches are uniquely combined with finished works, a mixture that allows showing what his creative process was, as well as delving into his more private facet and contrasting it with the public one. Despite feeling devotion for any external phenomenon, the Briton assembled his works from the studio, unlike impressionist painters, remembering what he had seen. To do so, he resorted to the drawings, sketches, and watercolors he made outdoors on his many trips through the United Kingdom and Europe, experiences complemented by his knowledge of natural sciences or mythology.
Many times, between the sketches and the final paintings, many years would pass. That is the case of four color studies of a bridge in Grenoble that crosses the Isère river, a town he visited for the first time in 1802, but for which it took him 20 years to paint the definitive watercolor. The same happens with The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons, one of the finished works exhibited at the MNAC. This painting finds its origin in some sketches he made in the summer of 1802, but he ended up presenting it eight years later. Furthermore, in this case, the original support, taken in summer, ends up being modified to reflect a not very summery phenomenon like an avalanche, showing the imagination of the British painter.
Although he was later labeled an Impressionist or abstract painter, Brown denies it. He was indeed ahead of his time, elevating landscape painting and aspiring for his paintings to go further, unlike what abstract art argued. "Turner's paintings are full of meaning and emotion, he wanted his landscapes to be felt," remarks the curator. "He was the Rothko of the 19th century without knowing it and perhaps without wanting it," adds Serra. For those looking for some of his most famous works, they will have to settle for two engravings that reproduce them, such as Rain, Steam and Speed or Snow Storm.
The MNAC wanted to continue the sensory experience proposed by Turner by drawing on its collection. The exhibition The Heartbeat of Nature continues the journey with a selection of 80 works from its own collection, mainly drawings. For its curators, Francesc Quílez and Aleix Roig, the exhibition establishes a dialogue with the British painter and continues to break the cliché of the landscape genre. It also allows discovering artists like Marià Fortuny and Baldomer Galofre in another format, in addition to giving visibility to an almost unknown collection. In this second part, the only female painter is Teresa Lostau. Both exhibitions, according to Serra, have cost 850,000 euros.