Turner's Modern World

David Blayney-Brown, Amy Concannon, Sam Smiles

From Shelf: Art for Art's Sake

A landmark new presentation of the work of J.M.W. Turner, repositioning the great painter as a pioneering chronicler of contemporary life, and exploring what it really means to be a modern artist.

A landmark new presentation of the work of J.M.W. Turner, repositioning the great painter as a pioneering chronicler of contemporary life, and exploring what it really means to be a modern artist. J.M.W. Turner's career spanned revolution and the Napoleonic War, Empire, the explosion of finance capitalism, the transition from sail to steam and from manpower to mechanisation, political reform and scientific and cultural advances that transformed society and shaped the modern world. While historians have long recognised that the industrial and political revolutions of the late eighteenth century inaugurated far reaching change and modernisation, these were often ignored by artists as they did not fit into established categories of pictorial representation. This extraordinary new publication shows Turner updating the language of art and transforming his style and practice to produce revelatory, definitive interpretations of modern subjects. This is J.M.W. Turner as he has never been seen before.

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