ABSTRACT
J. M. W. Turner's 'Regulus' is a harbour scene in the tradition of Claude. To the left are ships loading or unloading; to the right, high classical buildings, a crowded sea-front and, in the foreground, women and children washing and playing. Mark Francis pays tribute to a show curated in 1966 by Lawrence Gowing in New York, which, exhibiting the paintings frameless, presented Turner as an abstract expressionist avant la lettre. Turner's seascapes revel in their paradoxical combination of motion and stasis. On the horizon of 'Rough Sea with Wreckage' is a tiny sail, being driven towards the viewer and the wreck, perhaps then to be wrecked in its turn. The object by which the spatial and the temporal are most fundamentally connected is the sun. The painting brings together movement and stasis, time arrested and time passing, in a way that must be ignored if Turner is to be flattened into modernist framelessness.
