William Turner's Late Style: Speculation on its Development

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) is acknowledged to be one of the most creative of English artists. During the last twenty years of his life, Turner's paintings paid increasing attention to light and color, rather than to form and detail. For this reason, he has been called a forerunner of impressionism and compared to the abstractionists. This paper attempts to provide a psychoanalytic approach towards this development in his style and the unconscious import of these paintings.

In 1974 (Slap, 1974), I examined waking screens which comprise a variety of phenomena characterized by feelings of being surrounded or enveloped by transparent substances which create a sense of being separated from the world. Perceptions are muted and there may be associated depersonalization, derealization, and dreamlike states. The Wolf Man's veil (Freud, 1918) and the bell jar described by Sylvia Plath (1972) are familiar examples. My thesis was that waking screens are expressive of a wish to be asleep and that this wish arises from a combination of defensive motivation and regressive longing to merge with the mother of the oral phase. Responding to this paper, Sprague (1974) was reminded of certain paintings of Turner wherein an awesome event was depicted, but its impact softened by its being placed in the distance partially obscured by mist or fog. [See Figures 1 and 2.]

Following this suggestion and reviewing Turner's work, I formed the hypothesis that these paintings were strongly determined by primal scene fantasy. 1 suggested that the exciting event in the background, e.g. Parliament burning or a locomotive rushing over a bridge [See Figure 3], was derived from a disturbing sexual event and that the fog and smoke, a representation of a waking screen, were derived