ABSTRACT
The Turner revival owes its existence to a similar change in aesthetic perspective. The qualities that confer the mark of contemporaneity on Turner's late paintings—and most especially on his late water-colors—may be summed up in two words: color and light. Thus, Turner comes to us at the present moment as an inspired precursor of the attempt to create a pictorial style out of the materials of color alone. The dynamics of painting, the imagination of what the deployment of pure color was capable of expressing, came to hold equal sway over Turner's sensibilities. The purity of Cezanne's late painting, though more classical in its formal rigor than Turner's, is based, like Turner's, on the dynamics of the pictorial process. Turner's was a mind divided in its loyalty to two orders of visual reality—the reality of nature and the reality of the artistic process. Turner's modernity anticipates theirs, and in retrospect seems inevitable rather than willful or eccentric.
