Goethe writes the software for the late Turner currently at the Tate Britain

 

The exhibition that the Tate Britain is dedicating to the late years of J.M.W Turner – approximately 150 artworks produced by the artist between 1835 and 1850, including Turner’s nine controversial square canvases, here displayed for the first time ever – is the occasion to shed some lights on the role played by information in his art practice.

 

As a matter of fact, more than the many travels he did during the last bit of his life, and more than the people he met privately, the cultural sources Turner’s found at this time are what actually made this part of his artistic production so interesting. In particular, we believe that Turner’s fascination for “The Theory of color” by Goethe is what may explain better than anything else the great importance this artist had for a wide range of his colleagues, from the Impressionists to the contemporary masters such as Damien Hirst, or Olafur Eliasson (this latter has produced two artworks inspired to Turner in occasion of the exhibition at the Tate Britain).

 

Published in English in 1840, that is to say 30 years after its first original German edition, this inspiring book that Goethe mainly conceived as a confutation of the Newton’s theory of light, is the evidence proving that, despite Turner at that time was painting especially classic landscapes, or historical and mythological subjects, also in his late years his interest in the culture of his epoch was still well alive.

 

As Goethe claimed in his introduction to the book, the aim of his research was not explaining the essential nature of color, but to postulate it as a phenomenon, and merely to tell how it originates. But by following this path – and that is what may have interested also Wassily Kandinsky – Goethe put the viewer at the very centre of his meticulous research, describing the colour as a human, thus psychological, experience. In this sense, Goethe is to be considered a fundamental precursor of Vilayanur Ramachandran’s “primitive figural”, and probably the first one to face the problem of how our mind reacts to a specific kind of artistic stimulus.

 

By reading, and then adopting, Goethe’s theory, Turner not only pays tribute to the great German poet, but also proves that a considerable part of his artistic research was devoted to how the picture is perceived by the viewer and in which way this perception can be induced. Just like Hirst or Eliasson, and just like Kandinsky before them, Turner is worried about how the painting “works” in our mind. But at the same time he is also linking the picture to a precise area of culture, that is close to science and far from art criticism. Thus, it is Goethe, not what Ruskin writes about Turner in volume IV of his Modern Painter, the software the painter chooses to install in his extraordinary visual devices.

October 23, 2014