Turner at his best when turned inside out

At his death, in 1851, J.M.W. Turner left behind more than 19,000 watercolors and drawings, along with dozens of finished and unfinished paintings. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, not known for doing things by halves, has included some 140 of the artist's works in the retrospective on display in New York through Sept. 21, reinforcing the notion that, love him or hate him, the man was a workhorse.

The later landscapes -- the ones that seemingly emerged from smudge pots -- tend to appeal most to contemporary eyes. But Turner spent his earlier years faithfully depicting castles, ruins and squalls at sea, bowing to the era's fascination with the sublime and the picturesque.

The son of a barber, Turner generally fell in line with what was expected of artists in the late 1700s: He learned by studying the masters, embracing their ideas of proper subjects. History stood high on the ladder, and, with revolutions breaking out everywhere, Turner was ill positioned to object. He rendered the battle of Trafalgar, Hannibal crossing the Alps and the field at Waterloo.

Biblical and mythological themes found their way in as well.

Yet Turner was no cowed apprentice. Just 14 when he entered London's Royal Academy of Arts, he was soon marked as a rising star. His rebel impulses took form in watercolor, looked down upon at the time as "tinted drawing."

Though Turner realized he would have to succeed with oils to truly make a name for himself, his virtuosity let him elevate watercolor to a new position of respect.

In the Met exhibition, Turner's watercolors threaten to outshine his paintings. Among several arresting examples are his studies of the Houses of Parliament, which burned spectacularly in 1834. The paintings the event gave rise to are deservedly famous, but there is something mesmerizing about the studies, shapely bruises beset with bits of red an d yellow. It is as if we are invited to look with a surgeon's eye at some ghastly yet beautiful wound.

Some more traditional landscapes are equally pleasing. Scottish peat bogs are deftly rendered in sepia; a gothic church emerges against a wash of sky, with only a hint of foreground; the Grand Canal is a shimmering apparition.

But if Turner's watercolors gently evoke their subjects, many of the large-scale oil paintings read like exhaustive memos from which no fact is omitted. The later canvases, of course, become the proto-modern abstractions that to our eyes are more appealing. We say that Turner has become more about the light, and less about the objects rendered (and lo it is good). But where this preference comes from I have no idea.

For that matter, why should we lose our taste for history paintings? Because of photography, or the nightly news? Yet for the most part, we have lost it. Painters must find something else to do. That, or force us to connect with history in new ways. Think of Warhol's silk-screened Jacqueline Kennedy, and Gerhard Richter's not quite photo-realist renderings of the Baader Meinhof gang. Both raise questions about how we filter historical events; Turner was still trying to memorialize them.

Critics apparently loved to score points at Turner's expense. (The exhibition wall notes are almost obsessive on this point.) When he began using warmer colors, one accused him of having "yellow fever."

Another, commenting on some mid-career productions, said: "To speak of these works as pictures, would be an abuse of language." Responding to the flaming Houses of Parliament, someone else quipped that the Academy ought to "throw a wet blanket or some such damper over either this fire King or his works."

Turner forged ahead, moving in and out of fashion. Toward the end, he was decidedly out, his swirling colors and indistinct shapes inviting new ridicule ("the fruits of a diseased eye and reckless hand," and "mere freaks of chromomania.").

Yet Turner's studies, unfinished! paintings and late works now read as marvelously ahead of their time, and have been recognized as such since the early 20th century. In The Thames Above Waterloo Bridge, dark, urban forms mass behind a plume of pewter smoke, intimating the coming miseries of the Industrial Revolution.

At the other end of the spectrum, Turner appeared to be channeling the visions of William Blake. The Angel Standing in the Sun shows its subject sword in hand, in a golden vortex. At the upper left, a flock of birds barely notated in violet suggests that our fears are merely the blink of an eye. Or is it the potshots of critics that figure so little, compared with the artist's ravishment by light?

(M.J. Andersen is a member of The Providence Journal's editorial board.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)