John Martin in force at the Tate: dull would he be of soul who could pass by such a sight without strong feelings. But feelings of what —awe, amusement, perplexity? In my case all three. Awe first. The mounting of the show itself is pretty awesome: six rooms of Martin’s works from the 1810s to the early ’50s, well hung, handsomely catalogued, offering a once-in-generation chance of getting a rounded view of the man’s career and achievement. And Martin’s subject is Awe — Shock too, quite often. Belshazzar sees the writing on the wall; Gray’s Bard prepares to throw himself into the abyss; Joshua commands the sun to stand still; Vesuvius breaks open; Satan addresses the fallen angels; the Deluge threatens; Byron’s Manfred meets the Witch of the Alps; Sodom gets what’s coming to it. Oh, and the Last Judgment is played out on three very big canvases, to which the Tate has given a son et lumière presentation evoking their triumphant tour through Britain in the 1850s. (‘The most sublime and extraordinary pictures in the world’, declared the poster at Bradford, ‘inspected by upwards of 2,000,000 persons.’)
No one looking for the angst-inflected sublime of the early nineteenth century—best seen perhaps in the nightmare geological fantasy Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion—should miss the show, not least because an artist we may often have encountered in reproduction comes up much more impressively in the flesh, at full size and well lit. I was particularly struck by the scale of the mezzotints in his sequence after Paradise Lost, and suitably amazed by the extent of Edward I’s army in The Bard: stretching out behind the King in minute detail way, way up a narrow defile to the castle on the beetling crag above (all Martin’s crags beetle). Amazed, but—my second feeling—amused too, for though Martin the artist, inventive, enter-prising, diligent, full of high seriousness and big ideas, is hard to dislike, he is also hard to take wholly seriously.
‘What squalor! What detail!’ sing the chorus as they bustle round the sale room in Stravinsky’s Rake’s Progress. Here it’s ‘What horror! What detail!’, with the two things often at a bizarre angle to each other. On the one plane we have Nature, seen sometimes in broad vistas of becalmed, rather eerie, strangely back-lit lowlands (lakes and estuaries much in evidence), sometimes—more memorably and melodramatically—in craggier places battered or buckled by eruption, earthquake, rock-fall, tempest, torrent, lightning, lava flow. Alongside Nature but on another plane, we have human, demonic and occasionally angelic figures: very small almost always, the humans and demons typically presented en masse in varying states of amazement or panic, backed often by splendid, doomed palaces and cities of their own proud creation: Pandemonium, Thebes, Pompeii, Babylon. These anatomical and architectural forms are the work of a compulsive miniaturist with keen antiquarian interests and a fine line in architectural draughtsmanship; someone who sits very oddly in the same skin as the wild-eyed, bravura landscape artist who sends boulders the size of small islands tumbling down mountainsides in The Great Day of His Wrath.
In his sprightly and still valuable life-and-works monograph of 1975, William Feaver suggested that Martin’s imagination was printed with impressions of the Northern scenes of his boyhood: the Tyne Valley around Newcastle, the wilder parts of Hadrian’s Wall, the Castle Rock and Arthur’s Seat at Edinburgh. His art arguably expands the geological elements of such places to cyclopean dimensions and subjects them to extreme forces while at the same time miniaturising and archaeologising their human and architectural aspects — and there, with the two scales and styles combined, you have a Martin apocalypse. The concept is enterprising, the effrontery splendid, but all too often the result is no more than a bid to Catch Leviathan with an Hook. Hence the sense of unintended comedy. Try the Joshua canvas for Martin firing on all cylinders: ambitious, idiosyncratic, fascinating, artistically disastrous.
The perplexing thing to anyone intrigued by the man is that in his heyday he was so popular, while now he is likely to be of interest in the main either to folk involved in period historical studies—the admirable authors of the catalogue for instance—or, as the show points out, to admirers of the pop-filmic line running from D. W. Griffith to Ray Harryhausen, the wilder shores of CG and the heavy-metal record cover. How was it that Martin dropped out of the centre of things? I’d hazard that his initial glamour and fame rose in large part from his calling so much on things that especially resonated with his early audience: the new geology, the new archaeology, fossil-recording and tunnel-boring, the fashion for panoramas and dioramas, the cult of the romantic loner, anxiety at the expansion of the industrial city. It was when these lost some of their sheen that many of the paintings came to seem contrived, fussy, preachy, mannered, over-wrought. Something more oblique, more personal and better integrated formally would come to have more appeal: something that was creative rather than illustrative, something more like—well, it had to come out eventually—the elephant in the next room, J. M. W. Turner, the prime collection of whose work is only a step away from the Tate’s Martin show. Still, illustration well carried through is an honourable thing, and Martin is surely at his best when conscientiously and imaginatively illustrating English literary texts that give him a firm focus: James Ridley’s Tales of the Genii in Sadak, Gray’s ‘Bard’, Milton’s epic. These all generate anxious scenes; but then if there is one thing that Martin does better than Turner, it’s anxiety.
‘John Martin: Apocalypse’ is showing at Tate Britain, London, from
21 September 2011 to 15 January 2012.