Amidst the 2025 avalanche of Turner anniversary exhibitions, Walker Art Gallery's press office somehow managed the coup of getting their show featured on BBC national news, giving Turner: Always Contemporary a status not even Tate Britain's big show has achieved. There was a certain level of expectation, therefore, and there was a definite buzz in the air on the busy, soggy weekday I visited. The title, and indeed the opening work - Jeff Koon's otherworldly-blue Gazing Ball which enables you to reflect on yourself reflecting on an enlarged and precise Turner reproduction - give the sense that this is about Turner's influence on other artists. However, the show offers a more subtle, although perhaps also more controversial, argument, that Turner is always someone in whom we can see ourselves.
The Walker have largely drawn on their own Liverpool museums collections (I visited Sudley House the same day and found it denuded of Turners) and there is a lack of both individual show-stoppers, and of variety. The stand-out example on canvas is The Wreck Buoy, perhaps in part because it is a work which encapsulates Turner's whole career, started in 1807, praised by Ruskin, reworked into late atmospheric imprecision. Many of the other canvases, however, seem rooted in the languid language of Claude: a succession of soft, solar infusions which turn Scotland, Germany and Switzerland into little Italys. They finally dissolve completely into an abstracted pool of near-white light more blast furnace than sun: unsigned and unexhibited, one can argue over whether he considered it finished or not. However, although the exhibition hints at the well-worn Impressionist, modernist narrative that Turner was an artist who started in the seventeenth century and ended up in the twentieth, its thematic structure successfully counteracts this.
In fact, the large scale oils are less interesting than the works on paper which exemplify Turner as an artist of much greater variety and far less pomposity. The wall of Liber Studiorum prints has everything from humour, to tragedy, picturesque, topography and drama. Vertiginous alpine scenes, dissolving Venice, bustling fishermen, leisured ladies with the world at their feet. Turner's eye for observed detail is striking, his ability to see a composition even more so: Lancaster from the Aqueduct from c. 1825 has it all, industrial chimneys, ancient castle, resting and active figures, nature and man, all given an ethereal grandeur which elevates an inconsequential slice of northern England.
The exhibition intersperses Turner with an eclectic, in some cases almost random, selection of artists from both the 19th century and the present day. Monet is an obvious choice, although, Break-up of the Ice on the Seine, near Bennecourt is not his most obviously Turneresque work. The Pissarro represented is Lucien rather than Camille - again perhaps a case of what was available rather than what was most apt. G F Watts almost steals the show with two landscapes which out-Turner Turner with their luminous, literally gold-backed, abstraction. However, it is the less obvious and less well-known examples which really strike home. Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites are melded by Ruskin's enthusiasm and the bright airiness of John Brett and, later, Annie Swynnerton resonates. Locally based George Grainger Smith channels The Burning of the Houses of Parliament into Liverpool's Blitz. Too often, however, the connection is strained: Sheila Fell's moody vertical canvas is all earth not air and Bridget Riley's Egyptian colours form an odd dialogue with Venetian watercolours, especially as she is an avowed Turner agnostic.
Curator Melissa Gustin's unexpected move is to investigate 'always contemporary' not just as aesthetic influence but in ideological terms. The thematic sections are not afraid to foreground post-colonial and environmental ideas to suggest a sometimes tenuous continuity. Emma Stebbins documentation of glacial recession can be directly linked to locations visited by Turner (and Barns-Graham in the 1950s) and her works provide a strong ending. I am less enthusiastic about the curators pulling out coal-mining, china-making, shipping and slavery and their inclusion of commercial off-shoots like Turner Doc Martins seems more gimmick than substance. Turner does not need to be presented as some kind of artistic Nostradamus, nor do we need to be shunted towards 'relevance'.
Nevertheless, this is an hugely enjoyable and effective show. Gustin has admitted to using the Turner brand as an excuse to explore artists and ideas which interest her and the gutsy labelling ('Green Unpleasant Land' is bound to cause some mutterings) and unexpected curatorial choices - Ethel Walker's energetic seascape is a real treat - mean that there is always something to get your teeth into. Do we need Damien Hirst's sharks? Probably not, but in a year which has lauded Turner as an unparalleled practitioner, it is good to bring him down to earth, alongside fellow artists, across time. This is really a celebration of the multifarious ways nature has, to paraphrase Maggi Hambling, grabbed artists by the short and curlies. The ever-inquisitive, thrill-seeking Turner would have loved it and so did I.
