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From: Rex
Category: Art
Date: 10 February 2005
They've sold a billion tickets in advance, you see the middle classes don't know you can see plenty of Turners at The Tate anyway, that Whistler is a minor artist, and that Monet is good but they'll never understand why.
The show is all right. Turner kicks the asses of Monet and Whisler. Paint effects. It's a triumph of style over content, especially in Whistlers skimmed shadow scenes, all too neat a trick repeated with dimishing returns. There is a nice picture by Monet of ice on a river, his colour radiating winter sun cool. If one could look at paintings of landcityscapes and the like without thinking of calendars and people's drab taste, they would be good to look at. If abstraction, before the mental/cultural set had actually invented it, wasn't so pleasant to haters of modernism and now, then it might be exciting. If people liking strange fantasies of wrong colour and flatness and dabs weren't so stupid as to like paintings that are famous and show things they can vaguely make out, I would be pope.
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