JMW TURNER: ROMANCE & REALITY (YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART, NEW HAVEN, CT)
People may have flocked to see Caspar David Friedrich at the Met, but this smaller exhibition of works by William Turner at Yale demonstrated institutions may probe newfound interests in Romanticism within a more resonant framework. Turner once placed the viewer in the position of Regulus, the Roman statesman forcibly blinded by the sun (Jonathan Crary wrote a great essay about this); at another time, he daubed a “perfect” canvas with a spot of bright red, so as to not be shown up by his rival-admirer John Constable. His Slave Ship, 1840, remains one of the most devastating paintings of the nineteenth century. Which is to say, for all of Turner’s sublimity, his paintings always seem to remain tethered to the constraints of his form, to material reality and its discontents.
A collection show organized around a fake anni…
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