In my appreciation of Robert Hughes the other day, I quoted Hughes as maintaining that the purpose of art is:. But Twombly? I admit that before this exhibition I knew next to nothing about Twombly, so the title had a kind of falling to bathetic sound, especially having seen Turner Whistler Monet at Tate Britain in which had a decidedly more convincing ring to it.
The hanging is austere: there are no information panels. Otherwise you will be faced with a succession of startling visual juxtapositions, for the arrangement is not chronological, but thematic. The exhibition begins on the ground floor with a room devoted to the first of seven organising ideas. In the myth, Leander drowns as he swims across the Hellespont to visit his lover, Hero, and the paintings in this room are an expression of awe or terror when faced with the sublime power and beauty of the sea.
This pairing reveals that both Turner and Twombly engaged with history and mythology. And, just as Twombly adds handwritten words on his canvases to complement the visual references, so Turner also incorporated text in the form of verse which he exhibited alongside some of his paintings. Jeremy Lewison, the curator of the exhibition, explained the concept in the Tate magazine :.
This large-scale painting, in which a highly inflected surface of white and grey with touches of red and blue evokes sky and sea, seems to take up where Turner left off in a painting such as Rockets and Blue Lights close at Hand to warn Steam-Boats of Shoal-Water , where the evident power of nature is pitted against a foundering sailing boat. Both artists suggest the immensity of nature and the inconsequence of man before it. When Turner died in he left several unfinished paintings in his studio.
With the hindsight gained from Impressionism, these paintings have come to be appreciated as highly as his finished works — appreciated, indeed, as if they are finished works.
