Turner Does Dallas

Turner arrives in Dallas and the Dallas Morning News has a review claiming that "No artist has a greater claim to being the last of the traditionalists and the first of the moderns." I register a similar note in my review for the Guardian, though I am less sanguine about what it means for Turner to be such a transitional figure. There's a premium for transitional painters, and I think that we can get carried away in the search for those missing-link artists who bridge modernism and what came before: "A 1966 exhibit of 100 watercolours and oils that visited the Museum of Modern Art - not the Met - enrolled Turner in the ever-expanding chronicle of 19th-century painters whose work would prefigure the advent of Modernism."

Frankly, I think it was seeing Constable billed as the first modernist just several months before the Turner show (in the same museum, no less) that gave me pause. Had Constable painted for another 20 years, he would not have arrived at the earliest Impressionist works. Had Turner worked for another 10 years he would have—though, had his mental state not deteriorated to the degree that it did, he would not have arrived at the canvases that are most often greeted as Modern. There's a limit to these kinds of counterfactuals—what an artist might have discovered given the time to follow down some road he started on—and yet that seems to be what we are saying when we say that so-and-so non–Modernist painter was in fact the first Modernist painter.