The real Mr Turner: has Mike Leigh’s film got its man?

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/oct/31/turner-mike-leigh-film-timothy-spall

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Timothy Spall’s Turner is a strange, magnificent being. He gurns, he growls, he mumbles and grumbles. It is impossible not to be fascinated and moved by him. His onscreen death made me cry. But how much does this great plum pie of a man churning his way through a 19th-century England resemble the actual JMW Turner, who was born in 1775 and died in 1851?

The real Turner was a lot more handsome and elegant, at least in his own eyes. Spall’s Turner admits that “when I look in the mirror, I see a gargoyle”. Real Turner, when he was about 24 years old – much younger than when we meet him in the film – gazed in the mirror and saw a handsome, debonair, fiercely perceptive youth, his wide open eyes looking straight ahead, seeing everything.

It is those eyes that contain the true Turner. It is in their fiery vision of nature, myth and history that all his secrets can be found.

Turner lives in his paintings. You only have to stroll through Tate Britain’s Clore Gallery, which displays works from the copious bequest of his own work that Turner left the nation, or visit the same museum’s Late Turner exhibition, to realise that most of the painter’s time, energy and emotion must have gone into producing sketches, watercolours and oil paintings. The sex life and affairs whose enigmas drive the film did not matter to him except as light relief from all that exhausting work.

In short, the real Turner was not as cuddly as Leigh makes him. He was a driven artist. He wanted to compete not just with contemporaries such as John Constable – who in the film looks appropriately downtrodden by Turner’s remorseless artistic strength – but Poussin, Rembrandt and Leonardo da Vinci. He did it – he painted himself into the pantheon of the greatest artists of all time. There is no evidence that he cared who he hurt to get there.

Spall’s Turner is a rough diamond. Really rough. We see him spurn a former mistress and refuse to acknowledge paternity of their children; completely true. We also see him drawing a prostitute in a brothel – again, true to what is known about him. But the greatness of Spall’s acting lies in humanising a man who at times seems so brutal and cold. When he thinks about the daughter whose funeral he didn’t attend, he weeps. When he makes the prostitute pose, he also weeps. Is it guilt?

Leigh and Spall are just as blind as the moralising Victorians were to what is likely to have been Turner’s real attitude to love, sex and family responsibilities: he probably never felt a shred of anxiety about any of it. Where he came from, loving and leaving was natural. For he came from the 18th century.

Turner was the victim of a culture clash. He grew up and became an artist in the freewheeling Georgian age, when London was full of Hogarthian rakes and Moll Flanders types on the make. Even coffee houses frequently doubled as brothels. Don’t even ask about the bathhouses. As the Cambridge historian Vic Gatrell, whose recent book The First Bohemians delves into the artistic and sexual scene of 18th-century Covent Garden, told me: “I don’t think he’s self-conscious about his libertine ways.”

Eighteenth-century libertinism was simply the culture that shaped young Turner. He was born in Maiden Lane, close by Covent Garden, then the heart of London’s gambling, drinking and commercial sex district. His father was a barber, his mother was mentally ill, perhaps schizophrenic, and ended up in the notorious Bedlam hospital. It was, says Gatrell, a bohemian world.

This London of loose morals was remote from the same city in which he died in 1851. In the course of his lifetime, British manners were transformed. The freedoms of the Georgian age had become constrained by starched collars and cast-iron respectability. Turner’s great critical champion, John Ruskin, was one of the most Victorian of Victorians, and when he went through Turner’s artistic bequest at the National Gallery, he felt ill. He found not just the landscapes he loved, but sketches “of the most shameful sort – the pudenda of women – utterly inexcusable and to me inexplicable”. Ruskin revealed that he burned most of Turner’s erotic art, for the good of his hero’s reputation and the national soul. Strangely enough, he seems to have been lying. Tate Britain has now located enough of Turner’s sexy watercolours to establish that Ruskin never did burn them – or if he did destroy some, there must really have been a lot.

This was the second shock Ruskin and other Victorian Turner fans had suffered. The first was when he died in the secret Chelsea home he shared with his last lover, Mrs Booth, a Margate landlady. Leigh is on firmer ground in making this relationship touching and warm – they were both old enough and their life together lasted long enough for it to have been emotional, not just a libertine’s last fling.

In Turner’s painting Apollo and Python in Tate Britain, the ancient Greek god Apollo has just slain a horrific serpentine monster. Turner surrounds Apollo with golden light. He is the embodiment of reason and – literally – enlightenment. The monster Python lies tangled in the branches of devastated trees, its viscera spewing out. Its jaws are almost invisible in the darkness that envelops this part of the picture. Looking into that gloom, you start to notice something disturbing. There are other monsters in the dark. A glittering eye, a gruesome set of fangs glisten in the shadows. Python is dead, but unreason lives on. More monsters are creeping forward to threaten all that is good.

Is this painting autobiographical? It might be an exploration of the artist’s own dark side. He may be thinking of his mother’s madness. Was he scared of going mad himself? Yet any such personal feelings are translated by Turner to the lofty level of history painting. His art aspires all the time to say things not about him, but about the human condition. Apollo and Python is one of the greatest of all paintings of a Greek myth because it so deeply and resonantly reveals the poetry and philosophy of the ancient legend – that it is a story about reason, unreason and the nature of civilisation.

The inarticulacy of Spall’s Turner is true to life. He was mocked for it – and again it comes from his unvarnished London childhood. He came “out of the people, out of the plebs”, says Gatrell. But there’s always going to be something missing from our understanding of Turner if we only listen to his sometimes stumbling words. His paintings, truly, are where the real Mr Turner can be found. In them he does not stumble. He never has – Ruskin was right to insist – a mean or ignoble thought. Apollo and Python is unutterably profound. It is in his works of unparalleled insight and nuance that we encounter the real Mr Turner – the genius.