Hidden in Masterpieces

 

JMW Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great Western Railway (1844)

It’s no secret that Turner secreted a sprinting hare in the murky path of the approaching locomotive. The artist himself pointed it out to a little boy who visited the Royal Academy on varnishing day just as the work was about to go on show. But how does this tiny detail ignite the meaning of Turner’s huge meditation on encroaching technology? Why did he feel compelled to point it out? Since antiquity the hare has symbolised rebirth and hope. The emotions of visitors who saw the painting when it was first exhibited in 1844 were still raw with the horror of a tragedy that had occurred on Christmas Eve two and a half years earlier, when a train derailed 10 miles from the bridge depicted in the painting – an accident that killed nine third-class commuters and maimed another 16. By going small in the emblem of the hare, an artist famous for going big transforms his painting into a poignant tribute and meditation on the fragility of life.

Georges Seurat, Bathers at Asnières (1884)

The large painting of Parisians whiling away a lazy lunch hour on the banks of the river Seine, the first work ever exhibited by Seurat, was initially finished in 1884. It was then touched up by the artist years later, after he had begun to perfect his signature technique of applying small distinct dots that cohere in the eye of the observer when seen at a distance. The colour theory that underpins Seurat’s more mature pointillist style owes its origin in part to the ideas of a French chemist, Michel Eugène Chevreul, who explained how the juxtaposition of hues can generate a persistence of tone in our imagination. In the hazy distance of Seurat’s painting, a row of smokestacks rise from a factory that produced candles according to an industrial innovation for which Chevreul was also responsible. These chimneys, which seem more like paintbrushes daubing the work into existence, are a tribute to the thinker without whom Seurat’s resplendent vision would not have been possible.

Edvard Munch, The Scream (1893)

It has long been assumed that the howling figure in Edvard Munch’s The Scream – an archetype of angst that still flickers above the popular imagination more than a century after it was created – was indebted chiefly to the aghast expression frozen on the face of a Peruvian mummy that the artist encountered at the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris. But Munch was an artist concerned more about the future than the past, and especially anxious about the pace of technology. Surely he would have been even more deeply impressed by the breath-taking spectacle of an enormous lightbulb filled with 20,000 smaller bulbs that stood on a pedestal and towered over the pavilion in the same Exposition? A tribute to the ideas of Thomas Edison, the sculpture rose like a crystalline god heralding a new idolatry, flipping a switch in Munch’s mind. The contours of The Scream’s yowling face reflect with extraordinary precision the drooping jaw and bulbous cranium of Edison’s terrifying electric totem.

Gustav Klimt, The Kiss (1907)

Surely love and passion stand at the furthest extreme from the long white lab coats and microscopic slides of scientific testing. Not according to Gustav Klimt’s painting The Kiss. The year he painted his work, Vienna was alive with the language of platelets and blood cells, especially around the University of Vienna where Klimt himself had, years earlier, been invited to create paintings based on medical themes. Karl Landsteiner, a pioneering immunologist at the University (the scientist who first distinguished blood groups) was hard at work attempting to make blood transfusions succeed. Look closer at the curious patterns that throb on the woman’s frock in Klimt’s painting and one suddenly sees them for what they are: Petri dishes pulsing with cells as if the artist has offered us a scan of her soul. The Kiss is Klimt’s luminous biopsy of eternal love.