Famed artist Turner gets his biggest U.S. show

WASHINGTON -- Exhibits of J.M.W. Turner's work in recent years have shown snapshots of the famous British landscape painter's travels, styles and illustrations of history. Now the broad range of his six-decade career comes together in the largest Turner retrospective ever presented in the United States.

"J.M.W. Turner" opens Monday at the National Gallery of Art, showing some of his works for the first time in this country. The exhibition chronicles the artist's evolution — from his beginnings with architectural watercolors to his first oil paintings of rough seas and his iconic pictures of historic scenes — as well as his later, more abstract years, when some thought him a kook who had lost his touch.

In all, the exhibition shows the broad range of Turner's interests and techniques in a way curators said they haven't seen in years.

"He was nothing if not ambitious in the range of his art," said Franklin Kelly, the art gallery senior curator who coordinated the exhibit. "Many people who knew Turner's works were surprised when they met him that he wasn't some wild-haired romantic genius running around but in fact a short man wearing shabby clothes and given to muttering to himself."

About 140 works make up the exhibit, with contributions from museums in Cleveland, Kansas City, Philadelphia and others. Tate Britain, the national gallery of British art in London, is lending 85 works. After Washington, the exhibit opens at the Dallas Museum of Art on Feb. 10, 2008, and at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art on June 24, 2008.

Some notable paintings never before shown in the United States are "Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps" (1812) and "The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire" (1817), said Earl A. Powell III, director of the National Gallery of Art. The gallery also has produced a documentary film to accompany the exhibition.

One of the exhibition's goals has been to bring together some of the paradoxes of Turner's art, said Ian Warrell, a curator at London's Tate Britain gallery.