Turner: The Secret Sketchbooks (BBC2)
The BBC last night featured an unexpected art critic who spoke with great eloquence about J.M.W. Turner’s painting Falls Of The Rhine At Schaffhausen.
He drew our attention to the movement and thickness of the paint, and highlighted the way the artist expressed turbulence and unrest.
If you didn’t watch Turner: The Secret Sketchbooks, you might be surprised to learn that the expert in question was Ronnie Wood of The Rolling Stones.
He is not only an artist, but revealed that studying Turner’s work had helped with his music: ‘When I look at Turner’s paintings, they are the epitome of drama.’
When Turner died, he left 37,000 sketches, some of which can only be viewed after the 9pm watershed. This was their first appearance on British television.
The artist’s later life — when he began a passionate affair with his landlady in Margate — has been turned into a successful film, starring Tim Spall. But his early life is worth a movie of its own.
He was a working-class boy from Covent Garden, then a rather seedy area of London.
His father was a barber, and young Turner’s work was displayed proudly in the shop.
If you didn’t watch Turner: The Secret Sketchbooks, you might be surprised to learn that the expert in question was Ronnie Wood of The Rolling Stones
Some members of the Royal Academy were regular customers. They noticed the self-taught boy’s sketches, and enrolled him on the Academy’s drawing school.
He was the youngest student ever, but that wasn’t the only reason he stood out at the upper crust Academy. Anybody could see he had talent, but he was also very working class. Oh, the horror. It was like Danny Dyer presenting University Challenge.
One feature of the programme was talking heads who claimed that Turner was just like them. He was a Londoner, said Tim Spall, just like me.
He was an obsessive, said Chris Packham, just like me. And, like Turner, Tracey Emin didn’t fit in at art school, where people used to say: ‘It’s not that I have anything against her, but every time she opens her mouth it’s so shrill.’
She must have calmed down. These days, she’s so softly spoken she could run an elocution class.
The most fascinating — if slightly unlikely — contributions came from a psychoanalyst. His early paintings of buildings, she suggested, were a search for stability after a difficult childhood.
Turner’s mother had psychotic episodes at a time when madness was thought to run in families. He feared this would damage his career, and so he put her in a psychiatric hospital and never saw her again.
The programme proved that even the greatest artists have critics. ‘You can’t tell which is the land and which is the sky,’ sniffed one. Another observed of Turner’s later works: ‘His paintings look like omelettes.’
Talking of critics, when is the BBC going to commission Ronnie Wood On Art? I’d watch that.
– CHRISTOPHER STEVENS is away.
