J.M.W. TURNER PROBABLY BRITAIN’S GREATEST EVER ARTIST. CHRISTIES. MARSILIO ARTE, THE NEXT EARTH

With exhibitions around the world set to commemorate the painter’s birth in London 250 years ago, Alastair Smart sheds light on Pissarro’s observation that, in a sense, all modern art is ‘descended’ from him.

William Gay Turner was aware of his son’s precocious gift for art. The barber displayed the boy’s pictures in his shop in Covent Garden, pinning them up on the walls alongside a selection of periwigs. Customers coming in for a haircut duly became the first collectors of Joseph Mallord William Turner’s art.

 

A long and successful career lay ahead, prompting the esteemed art critic John Ruskin to describe him in 1840 as ‘the man who beyond all doubt is the greatest of the age’. The artist is still highly regarded today — his face adorns Bank of England £20 notes, and his name is attached to Britain’s principal award for contemporary art, the Turner Prize.

This year marks the 250th anniversary of Turner’s birth, and a programme of celebratory exhibitions and events is under way. ‘Turner 250’ will collectively explore the breadth of the artist’s career and last throughout 2025.

The exhibitions include Turner: In Light and Shade at the Whitworth in Manchester, focusing on the artist’s book of prints, the Liber Studiorum; Turner’s Kingdom: Beauty, Birds and Beasts at Turner’s House in Twickenham, devoted to his little-known studies of birds and other animals; Turner: Always Contemporary at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, considering his impact on succeeding generations of artists; and Turner and Constable at Tate Britain, examining the rivalry between him and his fellow British landscapist John Constable.

In the autumn, Turner’s largest painting, The Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805, will return to display for the first time in 18 months — at the Queen’s House in Greenwich — after conservation work. Around the same time, Tate will publish an online catalogue of its complete holdings of Turner’s sketchbooks, drawings and watercolours. These number more than 37,000 works, and the task took 20 years.

The anniversary is being marked beyond British shores, too, with exhibitions as far afield as the Museum of Art Pudong in Shanghai and the Yale Center for British Art in Connecticut.

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RSVP THE NEXT EARTH Evento collaterale della 19. Mostra Internazionale di Architettura – La Biennale di Venezia The Next Earth è un evento collaterale della 19. Mostra Internazionale di Architettura - La Biennale di Venezia e apre al pubblico con due installazioni espositive distribuite su due piani di Palazzo Diedo – Berggruen Arts & Culture, che mettono in relazione intelligenza artificiale, crisi ecologica e cosmologia planetaria. THE NOOCENE – Computation and Cosmology from Antikythera to AI A cura di Antikythera, il think tank interdisciplinare diretto da Benjamin Bratton, il progetto prende il nome dal meccanismo di Antikythera – un sofisticato calcolatore analogico greco, recuperato da un relitto nel mar Egeo e considerato il primo computer della storia. La mostra ripercorre l’evoluzione dell’intelligenza come forza cosmica, dagli strumenti di calcolo arcaici all’IA contemporanea. In esposizione: l’Harmonia Macrocosmica (1661), il più celebre atlante celeste barocco, che rese visibili le teorie rivali sull’universo con una forza estetica e didattica senza precedenti; la prima fotografia della Terra vista dalla Luna (NASA, 1966), un’immagine epocale che ha trasformato la percezione del nostro pianeta come entità finita, condivisa e fragile; il Monolito di Antikythera, un ambiente immersivo che intreccia cinema computazionale, dati, testi e musica, come strumento di pensiero planetario. CLIMATE WORK – Un/Worlding the Planet A cura del Dipartimento di Architettura del MIT – Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Climate Work raccoglie progetti che ridefiniscono l’architettura come pratica ecologica, geopolitica e speculativa. In mostra: simulazioni di ecologie costruite e sistemi adattivi per territori estremi, infrastrutture per la raccolta di risorse e dispositivi architettonici climaticamente consapevoli, nuove cartografie e visualizzazioni planetarie attraverso dati ambientali e immagini sintetiche.