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The end of the world is nigh. So proclaimed successive generations of British ‘millenarians’, from Milton and Byron to Blake and Coleridge, who believed that a cataclysmic correction of humanity’s sins would bring about Biblical deluges and plagues lasting the next thousand years. But, instead of walking around with sandwich boards strapped to their bodies, these unhinged zealots and dangerous subversives (as they were often branded) wrote inflammatory poetry and painted epic canvases on impending famine, war and pestilence.
Painterly pyrotechnician John Martin (1789-1854) was often lumped in with such Second Coming ‘catastrophists’, although it was actually his two brothers – one an inventor who walked around Newcastle with a conch shell on his head, the other committed for life to an asylum for burning down York Minster – that earned his family the unfortunate sobriquet of ‘the Mad Martins’.
Certainly, the first picture in Tate Britain’s reappraising retrospective gives the impression of John Martin as a lone voice railing into the wind. ‘The Bard’ of 1817 depicts a bearded prophet on a mountaintop, cursing an amassing English army, intent on marauding into Wales. However, this being the work of John ‘Apocalypse’ Martin, it’s safe to say that the scene looks nothing at all like the Welsh highlands, but could conceivably be the Swiss Alps on steroids.
If Martin frequently goes from the sublime to the ridiculous in a few brushstrokes – painting romantic landscapes that suddenly veer into perilous ravines or visions of hellfire, lava and brimstone – then it’s not only those with unfeasibly bardic names like mine who have enjoyed his hokey and theatrical panoramas. Indeed, the idea behind this full-scale survey of his work, the first since 1854, is to recuperate a reputation sullied by accusations of Barnum and Bailey-style showmanship and commercialism. By touring his gigantic pictures to science fairs, town halls and shopping centres, Martin pandered to Victorian populist taste and made himself a fortune while alienating the serious art critics, who were perhaps also affronted by this untrained, working-class Northumbrian storming into the affections of an uncultured nation.
Although he craved the acceptance of his better-known contemporaries, Martin was no JMW Turner or John Constable – indeed the latter cruelly dismissed Martin as a ‘painter of pantomimes’. He tried too hard to make his absurd fantasies convince, rendering exactly the swirls of smoke or jagged bolts of lightning, rather than alluding to them as elemental, incomprehensible forces of nature. Afraid to stop embellishing and let his landscapes do the talking, Martin was forever foregrounding complex narratives and groups of figures culled from classic literature or scripture, which prove as distracting as the titles are descriptive. You don’t need to know that it’s ‘Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still’, ‘The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah’ or ‘The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise’ to appreciate Martin’s works as grandiose, preposterous, but ultimately, guilty pleasures.
Martin painted such dizzying vistas of the siege of Babylon and the fall of Man that he must, at least in his mind’s eye, have lived on top of a tall hill. You too might want to hold on to something, as every picture makes you look down into a chasm before lurching upwards to the heavens. It’s a rush of viewer vertigo, patented long before 3D glasses. Such awe-inspiring visual trickery prefigured not just Hollywood special effects and CGI but graphic novels and post-apocalyptic computer-game worlds.
If Martin can’t now be dragged back into the annals of art history he was left out of, at least he can be restored to the ranks of a very British fantasist, in the manner of JRR Tolkien or Lewis Carroll.
The relentlessness of Martin’s hyperrealism begins to grate in the final stages of this exhibition, as do his megalomaniacal plans to reform London’s sewers and transport systems, not to mention the ornamental sideboard where he displayed his awards, medals and royal seals of approval.
If he never knew when to stop, then neither do the Tate’s curators, presenting his mind-boggling triptych, ‘The Last Judgement’ (1845-53), as a gaudy ‘son et lumière’ interlude, complete with booming voices and flashing projections. While it’s fun as a reminder of how this kind of art might once have been consumed, this ‘Last Judgement’ is already a superb and insane vision of our planet eating itself and doesn’t need any help in this regard. It also reduces Martin’s levels of seriousness back down to zero and suggests that us twenty-first-century gallery goers are similarly in thrall to a dose of cheap spectacle and a few whizz-bang fireworks.
Before you say ‘Armageddon outta here’, though, spare a few minutes in the last room to see Martin at his lonely, eccentric best. In the final reckoning, in pictures such as ‘The Last Man’ (1833) and ‘Solitude’ (1843), he shows that he could touch on the transcendent in art without relying on a disaster to wow the crowds.
‘John Martin: Apocalypse’ continues at Tate Britain until January 15 2012.