Lunch With Lucio

And so to the Tate for a long awaited meeting with international man of mystery, intellectual culture vulture and prince of erudition, Lucio.

Click on us. We get bigger!
And note the Turneresque light.
Entirely deliberate – Ha!

It turns out that not only is he devilishly handsome but also completely charming, utterly delightful company and great fun, too. I can't wait for our next meeting.
For any who may not know and are of an artistic temperament, Lucio's main blog is over here. It now features some lovely photographs from his recent European travels.

Anyhoo, when at the Tate one must look round, and look round we did (after enjoying lunch, which Lucio insisted on paying for, bless him).
First up is a big Hoorah! At last, after a two year absence, my favourite Millais paintings - Ophelia and Maryann - are once more hung together in the Pre-Raphaelite Gallery so we started there. You can get right up close to these paintings and wonder at their luminescence and detail. Millais painted them into thick wet white ground with a tiny sable brush and managed about a square inch a day.

The Tate is always swapping things around just to confuse me. Yesterday my favourite Bacon (Study For Three Figures At The Base Of A Crucifixion) was out on tour but there was plenty new to gawp at, including the BIG Hockneys in their own room. Well impressive!

The spooky Cholmondeley Sisters were there, bonkers and sad as ever. I always stop off to say hello to them. Also Robyn's infamous man with no trousers.

But the main reason we were there was the big 'Turner And The Masters' show.
Go see it. But more importantly, go see what they've done to fill the gaps taken by the paintings in the main show.
By removing all of the big early classical scenes from the Clore Gallery (the home of the Turner Collection) to put with the Titians and Canalettos et al in the big show, those lovely people at the Tate have unwittingly given us an even better show.
And it's FREE!

The Clore Gallery is currently filled with room after room of late and unfinished Turner masterworks; the insane, passionate orgasms of light that most ascribe to failing sight and galloping senile dementia.
A breathtaking display that is easily the best art exhibition anywhere on the planet this year.

Lucio and I were transfixed. We were like kids in a candy shop. Everywhere we looked was a masterpiece of colour and light: Turner at the pinnacle of his power. We stalked from room to room stopping to gasp in awe at the sheer numbers and mind-blowing intensity of emotion on display, getting increasingly worked up in our own passionate enthusiasm (lots of splendid arm-waving and expostulation - yay).

Whole months worth of glorious Turner sunsets are on display that have never been gathered together before. Getting up close and personal we were overwhelmed by the sheer insanity of his palette knife work. Lucio said that he was painting not light but luminescence and he was right. And Turner was painting it in a way that nobody had done before, or indeed since.
At the centre of a massive sunset, the very last stroke of one painting was the sun itself. We could see how carefully he had mixed the color; an intense custardy, egg-yolk yellow infused with tints of crimson; but then he had simply thrown it onto the canvas with one big splat of the palette knife. And it was perfect! Such passion, such confidence were awe-inspiring. And to paint this way in the 1830s, long before Monet seems amazing to us. Dozens of mad, bright, brilliant canvases assailed us everywhere we looked.

One painting in particular I had never seen in the Clore or indeed anywhere else. Its combination of fine detail and unchained chaos gives the lie to theories that his later works were due to failing eyesight or the onset of madness. He could still paint in the classical style but he could also unleash himself in a frenzy of pure, undiluted passion.
It is a frankly astonishing painting.
Only a few years after Joseph Wright of Derby painted many a similar scene Turner let himself loose on the hellfires of the Industrial Revolution. The inside of an iron foundry at night, filled with BIG light and dark, massive contrasts of flame and deep shadow.
Down at the bottom right hand corner, taking up no more than a quarter of the painting, tiny, highly detailed figures of steelworkers huddle in the dark, dwarfed by mighty machinery, massive cogs and wheels churning and hammering in the darkness.
But where, in a Joseph Wright painting the crucible itself should be, in Turner's vision all Hell has broken loose … Dante's Inferno has come to life and leaps out of the canvas at us in an apocalyptic fiery furnace of coruscating light, molten steel, sparks and flame.
After such careful and lifelike rendering of the tiny figures cowering in the corner, the rest of that mad, incredible painting looks for all the world as if Turner has attacked the canvas with fistsful of lead white, chrome yellow and cadmium red, hurling great wads of thick impasto, shards of light, explosions of blinding colour at the surface before diving in there himself to attack it in a thrashing frenzy of intense screaming passion, a desperate fight to the death to render light and colour more intensely than the eye can ever see; smearing the glistening oils, slashing and stabbing with palette knife, clawing with fingers and nails (you can still see every mark), shrieking, possesed by madness and desire until at last collapsing, sated, gasping and spent on the floor beneath what is inalienably, even today, a shocking, daring, modern and completely fucking bonkers masterpiece.
Of course I could be wrong, but that's how it looks like he painted it.

I'm going back on Monday to see it again. Woohoo!

And that is only one of dozens of astonishing canvases on display. They won't be there much longer; when the big exhibition is over they'll be hidden away in the basement once more. Maybe in a decade or two, if someone has the vision and the money, such a glorious display of late Turners will be put together in a big, blockbuster exhibition. But don't wait up. It is there right now and it is free! Both Lucio and myself were privileged to catch such a magnificent moment. You'd be mad to miss it yourself.

So steal, maim, kill if you have to but get there!

Toodle Pip!