In this talk, Nathan Hensley showed how J.M.W. Turner’s still-astonishing paintings of Victorian energy transition capture a society in the midst of realizing it was killing itself. With readings of famous canvases, unfinished works, and tiny sketchbooks, Hensley revised the common understanding of Turner’s atmospheric approach to modernization by describing the material composition of the paintings themselves. For Turner, participation in modern ruin was also a matter of pigment chemistry, painterly gesture, and experiments with point of view whereby the shipwreck of the world is viewed not from the safety of shore but from inside the vortex (Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth, 1842). This argument draws on chemical studies of Turner’s palettes and concludes with an account of Turner’s undisplayed sketchbooks, which refuse the maximalist vocabularies of his academic work in favor of the intimate, the gestural, and the unfinished: three aesthetic categories Hensley offered as counterpoints to world-scaled terms like "the Anthropocene" and even "climate change."
Michael Scott, director of the Future of the Humanities Project, provided opening and closing remarks, and Kathryn Temple, a Future of the Humanities Project senior fellow, moderated a Q&A session following the presentation.
This event was sponsored by the Future of the Humanities Project; the Georgetown Humanities Initiative; the Georgetown Master's Program in the Engaged and Public Humanities; Campion Hall, Oxford; and the Las Casas Institute (Blackfriars Hall, Oxford). It is part of the one-year-long series A Bent but Beautiful World: Literature, Art, and the Environment.
