Don't miss Late Turner: Painting Set Free at Tate Britain if you can get to London. I felt like crying from start to finish and not from grief but from the wonder of what a great artist can do--and did In case this does not translate well:
James Mallord William Turner, baptised in St. Paul's, in Covent Garden, died in 1851. He was 76 and had never lost his Cockney accent. There is nothing rough and tumble; nothing- in- your- face "Don't mistake me for a refined man" about these works of his last 10 years on earth. They are the most thrilling, poetic, sometimes disturbing, pictures created by an Englishman. Before --or since.
Some artists--DeKooning more recently and Picasso before him-- lose power in their last years. Not Turner. His late pictures could not seem more fresh nor more daring. So many are seemingly abstract or very nearly yet always the oils and watercolours seem to have been observed with exquisite attention to detail. The water shown in the painting of a storm at sea at the top of this post has the lush density and soft sheen of sheared fur. You look and understand that water alive; it can cause mayhem even death or be transporting to ride upon or gaze at. There visions of pastoral paradise, too. If ever there was a case where less is more, JMW Turner makes it exquistely.
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