For the first time Rome, at the Chiostro del Bramante until 26 August, is hosting an exhibition of the main works of the romantic English artist Joseph Mallord William Turner, an intimate and reserved collection donated entirely to England and conserved at the Tate Britain in London.
The exhibition of “TURNER. Works of the Tate” is divided into six sections and has over ninety works of art, including sketches, studies, watercolors, drawings that have influenced artists of the caliber of Claude Monet, Caspar David Friedrich, Vincent Van Gogh, Edgar Degas, Paul Klee, Franz Marc, Wassily Kandinsky, Gustav Klimt, Mark Rothko, James Turrell and Olafur Eliasson.
The works on display all come from the so-called "Turner Bequest", i.e. a huge legacy consisting of around 30.000 paper works, 300 oils and 280 sketchbooks which was donated to Great Britain five years after the artist's death in 1851: they are works that the artist had created and decided to keep for himself, within an intimate personal collection that the artist wanted to keep close to him throughout his life.
A precocious talent and tireless traveller, Turner visited many countries in Europe and also deeply loved Italy, traveling between Milan, Turin, Venice, Rome, Naples, Florence and Paestum. Despite the fact that he appeared as a controversial artist in the XNUMXth century, he is now recognized by critics for having elevated landscape painting and for having perfectly interpreted in art the sentiment of the sublime, first theorized by Edmund Burke for whom "anything that can arouse ideas of pain and danger, i.e. everything that is in some sense terrible or that concerns terrible objects, or that acts analogously to terror" and Burke has always been convinced of the fact that "the ideas connected with suffering are much more powerful than those involving pleasure.
“Indeterminacy is my forte” Turner once said when speaking of his art and every corner of the exhibition transpires emotions, suggestions, hinted brushstrokes and splendid plays of light which should have helped the spectator to compose the image and which have always been necessary to let the intimacy and romance that Turner always sought speak.
