John Martin: Apocalypse

Review of the Tate Britain exhibition, September 2011 - January 2012

John Martin: The great day of his wrath (1851-3; 196.5 x 303.2 cm; Tate Britain, London)

The curators of this exhibition are keen to underline the connection between John Martin’s images of cataclysmic destruction and the grand-scale disaster movies of our later age. Indeed various film directors consciously modelled scenes on Martin’s paintings.

And as with the makers of disaster movies, one inevitably wonders about the motives of the artist who paints so many huge and terrible scenes with such apparent loving care. Martin, like a number of his contemporaries in the age before cinema and TV, gained great commercial success by charging an entrance fee to view his works outside the normal circuit of fine art venues. After his death, his last and most famous works, a triptych showing the destruction of the world, the final judgement, and the blissful existence in the Plains of Heaven, went on a twenty-year tour, including to the USA and Australia, and were seen by an estimated eight million people. Martin’s reputation consequently see-sawed between those (including himself) who viewed his work as high art, and others who condemned it as tawdry showmanship.

The Tate, incidentally, normally hangs the triptych so high on a wall that they sadly go unnoticed by many visitors. If for no other reason, this exhibition is worth the trip just to see these mighty productions at eye-level. Here we can stand before them and feel the force of the tumult as part of the world turns literally upside down, and see the terrible inky blackness of the abyss into which it is about to fall. They are certainly entertaining, and their delight in detail and romantic landscape offers a refreshing alternative to the reductivism of abstraction and conceptualism that supplanted them.

John Martin: The great plains of heaven (1851-3; 198.8 x 306.7 cm; Tate Britain, London)

This review was first published in Third Way (November 2011

John Martin: The great day of his wrath (1851-3; 196.5 x 303.2 cm; Tate Britain, London)

The curators of this exhibition are keen to underline the connection between John Martin’s images of cataclysmic destruction and the grand-scale disaster movies of our later age. Indeed various film directors consciously modelled scenes on Martin’s paintings.

And as with the makers of disaster movies, one inevitably wonders about the motives of the artist who paints so many huge and terrible scenes with such apparent loving care. Martin, like a number of his contemporaries in the age before cinema and TV, gained great commercial success by charging an entrance fee to view his works outside the normal circuit of fine art venues. After his death, his last and most famous works, a triptych showing the destruction of the world, the final judgement, and the blissful existence in the Plains of Heaven, went on a twenty-year tour, including to the USA and Australia, and were seen by an estimated eight million people. Martin’s reputation consequently see-sawed between those (including himself) who viewed his work as high art, and others who condemned it as tawdry showmanship.

The Tate, incidentally, normally hangs the triptych so high on a wall that they sadly go unnoticed by many visitors. If for no other reason, this exhibition is worth the trip just to see these mighty productions at eye-level. Here we can stand before them and feel the force of the tumult as part of the world turns literally upside down, and see the terrible inky blackness of the abyss into which it is about to fall. They are certainly entertaining, and their delight in detail and romantic landscape offers a refreshing alternative to the reductivism of abstraction and conceptualism that supplanted them.