Word: painters
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...good to be true about famous last words. Did Oscar Wilde really say, "Either that wallpaper goes or I do"? I certainly hope so, but still. So we should be careful with the claim that in his last recorded utterance, a few weeks before he died, the English painter J.M.W. Turner, the man who whipped up force fields of light, who could make light obliterate almost everything it fell on and then make it spell out everything else, turned to somebody and said...
...didn't say that, he certainly should have. Turner devoted his life to light, even when his public couldn't follow him into it. His admirers, and they included the great polemicist John Ruskin, called him the supreme English painter of his day. His critics, and there were more of them all the time, thought his watercolors were "crude blotches" and his oils a "gross outrage." They also routinely called him insane (which hurt--his mother had died in Bedlam, the London asylum). Their complaints boiled down to the same thing. Turner made light tangible but things illegible...
...exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, which travels next to Dallas and New York City, is a show in that vein. With almost 150 works, it's a full picture of the entire man. All the same, while people will come away impressed by Turner the painter of historic events and modern horrors, one as forceful and sometimes as original as Goya, the man they'll be in awe of is still that other Turner, the incandescent bulb, the great conductor of solar power...
Turner didn't always deal in turmoil. His great hero was Claude Lorrain, the 17th century French landscape painter who invented formats like the idealized harbor, places flanked by classical piles, where a setting sun bears down gently on the horizon. In Caernarvon Castle, an early watercolor flushed with orange twilight, Turner took Lorrain's tranquil model and invested it with the nostalgia and high-minded melancholy of English Romanticism...
...French Laundry in Napa Valley, California; Alain Passard from L'Arpège in Paris; Santi Santamaria from Can Fabes in Catalonia and Nicolas Le Bec from Lyon. Wineries from world-renowned regions including Chateau Haut-Brion from Bordeaux and Frescobaldi from Tuscany will host tastings, and German painter Hella Nohl will discuss red wine's place in her palette. www.rhwfae.com...