"Today is J.M.W. Turner's birthday. From
The "Turner on the Tyne" video this tweet links to is so AMAZING, I just HAD to share it here...
This video appears on a funky NGA site called "Art Babble," which in my view warrants two thumbs up for this video alone.
The NGA hosted a major Turner retrospective a few years ago. A very deadpan German-born art history professor in an Impressionism/Realism class I took in college always swooned over Turner - and lambasted most of the famous French Impressionists in the process.
"Impressionism is like a pretty girl in a bar," he would say, his lip curling in a snarky smirk (I later found out he was also spending quite a bit of 'quality time' himself with some 'pretty girls' who were undergrad students at this university, which landed him in a bit of trouble!). "From a distance she looks very nice but then you walk up to her and start talking to her and realize she is not really that pretty and she is all style, no substance."
That, at least, was HIS take on Impressionism (versus Realism, which he ADORED - we looked at a lot of Courbet slides in that class!).
Fans of the Impressionists, would of course, beg to differ.
One thing everyone can probably, however, agree on is that Turner was a genius.
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