In an interview with The Guardian in November 2010, Penelope Curtis revealed her plans for Tate Britain as the gallery’s newly appointed director: ‘I want it to be bolder.’ A year on, this season’s retrospective of the extraordinary romantic landscapist John Martin (1789-1854) certainly delivers on her vision, strobe lighting and all.

In his own day, Martin’s art was ‘phenomenally popular.’ One poster described his paintings as some of ‘the most sublime and extraordinary in the world’, claiming they had been ‘inspected by upwards of 2,000,000 people.’ And yet Martin always wished to be held in the highest esteem as a fine artist, not a public entertainer. Indeed, he published exhibition pamphlets (Room 2) that presented the viewer with a key and a specific route that the eye should follow around the canvas, lest the power of the painting be diminished by any iconographic misunderstandings.

The exhibition negotiates these high and low tensions with great dexterity, reaching a crescendo in Room 5. Here, Martin’s Last Judgment Triptych (c.1845-53), perhaps his career defining magnum opus, is the stage set for a specially commissioned sound and light show. Away from the grey walls and information plaques, these works become the spectacle that one imagines they might have been for Victorian society. And yet once the lights went up, I watched visitors shuffle down from the aisles and quietly re-engage with the canvases, inspecting the brushwork and decoding the iconography. This sort of polarised viewing experience was noted by a critic of Martin’s own day, who described his pictures as ‘bold experiments in the public taste.’ As a sort of cinematic Gesamtkunstwerk, the exhibition represents a ‘bold experiment’ in its own right, exploring Martin’s work through new narratives such as contemporary cinema. In doing so, the show upholds Penelope Curtis’s curatorial objectives while recontextualising John Martin’s own art for today’s audience.

Unitl Jan 15

ANDREW LOWKES