Pluie, vapeur et vitesse chez Turner

Abstract

The title of Turner’s painting, Rain, Steam and Speed, encapsulates the thematic description of a vast number of his works, but also evokes his swift pseudo-blot technique, which ventures to collaborate with the random laws of the elements and painting material. Indeed, his impetuous manner and use of steam-generating « thermic » colours, as he called them, reflect the subjects of his pictures which conjure up the contemporary discoveries of thermodynamics. The phrase « Rain, Steam and Speed » is also reminiscent of his programme of painting or « visuality » : his rain and steam are redolent of the mystical apophatic clouds, where spareness and asceticism are the sole means of access to the blaze of representation.