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Turner (4/8)

This is also part of this series: Simon Schama's The Power of Art (8)

Subjects: Anthropology, Art, Biographies, History, Political Science

Grade Level: SrH-Adult
Producer: BBC
Closed Captioned: No

Running Time: 50 mins
Country of Origin: Great Britain
Study Guide: No

Copyright Date: 2006
Available in French: No

Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon Coming On (“The Slave Ship”) (1840)

May, 1840. Turner brings seven paintings to exhibit at the Royal Academy Annual Exhibition, and faces the biggest critical onslaught of his life. The target of the most poisonous attacks is The Slave Ship: at once allegory, history and seascape, an explosion of scarlet and gold, lost in the ocean between history and fantasy.

For contemporaries, it is “a kitchen accident”, “a detestable absurdity”; Turner's art has abandoned what it is supposed to do – to look like things.

Freed from the job of describing the mere look of the world, Turner shows that art can now go to the heart of the matter, to take the viewer right into the eye of the storm.

Links: www.bbc.co.uk/arts/powerofart/

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