JOHN MARTIN: APOCALYPSE at the TATE BRITAIN

JOHN MARTIN: APOCALYPSE at the TATE BRITAIN

 John Martin (1789-1854) was a British artist born in Newcastle into a working class family. Martin's work contrasts with that of contemporaries William Blake (1757-1827) and JMW Turner (1775-1851). Technically he was compared to Turner and his subject matter overlaps strongly with that of Blake. His reconstructions of biblical scenes offer a great urge towards verisimilitude even if there's always a hotch potch of details as in his painting The Fall of Babylon (1819). Ancient Babylon with 18th century-style ships, Babylonian soldiers in Roman uniform climbing into Victorian carriages under what seem to be Japanese bonsai trees. 

Martin wanted to be taken seriously and often provided keys and appendixes to his paintings demonstrating their links to actual history. He sought to engage with Victorian populism, which was very unfashionable among the intellectual elites but also dearly wished to be taken seriously by the art establishment. Contemporary critics were often uncertain about Martin's art even though the general public uncritically endorsed it. Martin was also endorsed by aristocratic patrons like Prince Albert. However the Royal Academy never opened its doors to him and probably disdained the mix of populism, biblical apocalypse, sensationalism and what William Hazlitt called the 'gaudy panoramic view'. His skills are not those of the oil painter either for he commits many errors especially in using non-naturalistic colour, laying down inert blocks of paint alongside his trade mark and oft repeated lightning bolt. 

Martin was a technician with visionary scope. His basic training was in craft painting, for he had been apprenticed, but not in fine art. It's easy to see then the reasons why his art was never accepted critically but for all that Martin made a fortune, then managed to squander it. Martin's art is grandiose, sensationalising subject matter and quasi-biblical apocalypse in his blockbuster period which began after his period of early development (1807-1820). The height of his success can be traced to the years 1816-1824 in a series of blockbuster paintings which include Belshazzar's Feast (1820), Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand still upon Gibeon (1816) and The Fall of Babylon (1819). He didn't always choose biblical subjects but even idiosyncratic or odd choices of thematic material based on popular public poetry of the time such as James Ridley's Orientalist popular fantasy Tales of the Genii (1764). 

Martin never really matched Turner in terms of technique, his approach to his subject matter pre-dates yet anticipates photography but moreso cinema. It also offers a contrast to Blake's idiosyncratic yet vivid, primitive approach. Martin seems to be like D.W.Griffith who made Birth of a Nation then realised that public opinion viewed the film as racist then made Intolerance which demonstrated that the film maker was actually a liberal interrogator of history. In fact Martin's painting The Fall of Babylon can be seen as an adumbration of Intolerance. Because of Martin's technical failings but visionary scope he seems to anticipate the blockbuster films of our era but, as the exhibition demonstrates Martin was a showman who went out to create works for the public imagination which then went out of fashion as contemporary culture changed. 

Martin's work was immensely popular and large chunks of it went on travelling shows throughout Britain. The later mezzotints also ensured that his work was seen all over the world. Martin constantly circled his subject matter, endorsing then distancing himself from it. Biblical topics provided him with a good deal of his subject matter but also John Milton's Paradise Lost which he illustrated but he would also depict other kinds of apocalypse such as his work The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum (1822). This is an undoubtedly portentous work. It's hard not to attach the tag 'great' to it with its depiction of the death of Pliny the Elder against the backdrop of the catastrophic destruction of Pompeii in a swirl of boiling hot reds. This is great panoramic painting achieved with immense talent and obvious showmanship. For all that it encountered criticism for its populism and bad taste. 

Martin experienced financial vicissitudes as the public lost interest in his work but later on managed to re-invent himself. He was therefore palpably capable of a degree of self-criticism. Martin's re-inventions were mainly in terms of technique, abandoning oil painting in favour of mezzotint from 1824-37. Mezzotint was a form of printing popular in the early Victorian era. It preceded photography but offered a similar range of effects. Martin had real dramatic, narrative skills although only one theme, destruction, or damnation, and, concomitantly, salvation. There's no evidence of a neutral middleground or even the sublimity evident in Turner's painting. Martin was an artist with one grand theme that he circled endlessly. Martin depicts crowds effectively, whether vast armies, hordes or banqueteers but seems to ignore portraiture or the individuated subject. Martin's figures are always part of a vast homogenous crowd. He therefore seems to have no interest in the individual but only in stirring, sensational public effects which deliberately worked upon an enormous God-fearing public who had a seemingly endless appetite for his work. 

Once Martin found his blueprint he stuck to it unlike the great masters who were capable of self-criticism and of instigating new periods throughout their lives. Martin's key innovation was undoubtedly his work in mezzotint but he eventually abandoned these to work on vast engineering schemes which included the reform of London's sewage and transport systems. However, these ultimately came to nothing and were probably blocked by then prevailing interest groups. Martin was a reformer but also a commerical artist, a contradictory figure who summons up all the sublime, slightly tragic tropes of the era: immense endeavour, incredible energy, fervent moralising, apocalypse or salvation. He had many flaws but it is still impossible to pin down exactly what he was although he was undoubtedly an important Victorian reformer and prophet. 

Eventually Martin returned to oil paint and his favourite topics which became ever more extravagent, garish and absurd. Two works depict the flood, The Eve of the Deluge (1840) and The Assuaging of the Waters (1840). The first painting was criticised for its garish colouring and artificial effects but was bought by the Prince Consort. Martin was extremely proud of the connection with the Royal Family and of his other achievements. He seems to have been extremely vain yet inherently decent, an odd combination. At the same time he painted his only realist painting, Queen Victoria's coronation in 1838, depicting a real-life moment of crisis when a peer tripped on the red carpet. Victoria is humanised by her instinctive attempt to help. Martin wanted to celebrate the new monarch who turned out happily to be an improvement on the previous two. Martin lived in a pre-Freudian era, his work The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (1852) undoubtedly underline the brilliant qualities of Martin's art alongside the tripe, the populism, the bad taste. It's hard to see such a work being presented in our own era without a great deal of ensuing laughter but Martin was painting in the mid-Victorian era when biblical concepts of judgement (and populist homophobia) were rampant. The painting is still amazing, presaging blockbusters like Roland Emmerich's recent The Day after Tomorrow and 2012 which keep alive the spirit of Martin and of the public's obvious enjoyment of grand spectacle, destruction on a vast scale alongside a grandiosly obvious, bombastic biblical moral message. 

His last work, the triptych The Great Day of His Wrath (1851-3), The Last Judgement and The Plains of Heaven are similarly gargantuan offering terrifying visions of apocalypse, judgement, damnation and salvation. They have to be seen to be believed. They also influenced the Hollywood animator Ray Harryhausen and other sci-fi artists of our own era and continue to do so. 

Martin's life was also tainted by tragedy and crisis. His brother went tragically insane, burning down York Minster and consequentially became a patient in a mental hospital. Martin busied himself with his brother's legal defence, later visited him in hospital, bringing him artist's materials where he painted a version of Martin's own painting The Fall of Babylon with the Houses of Parliament replacing Babylon. Obviously Martin was able to harness the grandiose visions whereas his brother unfortunately succumbed to them. His son Charles was also a gifted artist, his painting of his father exhibited here provides evidence of these gifts. This exhibition is a great introduction to the works of John Martin who pre-dated our own era but also foretold it. His work went out of fashion in the early Twentieth-century but is now part of our artistic language and heritage again.

 Paul Murphy, The Tate Britain, November 2011