All art is performative and Turner was a particularly theatrical public performer. His swift rise to fame was watched admiringly by artists and the art-going public; even after his art soared into realms that seemed incredible they continued to watch, with responses veering between amazed appreciation and ridicule: ‘It is all very well to treat Turner’s pictures as jests,’ admonished The Times in 1846, ‘but things like this are too magnificent for jokes.’ Meanwhile, gossip followed the person behind the art. Almost every writer during more than two hundred years has seen fit to mention that the famous artist with the name that rolls grandly off the tongue, Joseph Mallord William Turner, was the son of a barber. They say he cut an odd figure with his large nose, prominent stomach and short legs, his secrecy, competitiveness, and professional jealousy. Yet Turner performed in public if he could thereby grab the limelight for his pictures. Tales are told of him on Varnishing Day (when artists gave a last polish to their paintings before the opening of the annual Royal Academy and British Institution exhibitions) briskly applying just the coloured glaze or scumble of bright colour that would cast a pall over rival paintings: the catalogue for this exhibition illustrates S.W. Parrott’s picture of Turner on Varnishing Day (1846). Yet the Dickensian caricature of Turner vanishes before – it simply cannot co-exist with – the sublime grandeur of his best paintings.

Peace – Burial at Sea (1842), is urgent with the artist’s desire for immortality. (Its absurd pair in this exhibition pictures Napoleon, improbably standing on water in a landscape fiery with sunset.) The stimulus for the painting was the funeral of an artist friend, David Wilkie, who died and was buried at sea off Gibraltar. However, the continuing life of this marine image of electrifying rhetoric – such as Turner himself had perfected to celebrate the exploits of the British Navy – is not the biographical fact, but how the painting transmutes death into endless still life, nature morte, the very life of art. In paintings such as this Turner, impassioned, opens the viewer to a corresponding sense of the sublime.

From the sublime to the ridiculous was an all-too-easy step for Turner. Some excellent catalogue texts explain how and why he overshot or otherwise misjudged his mark. More importantly, the paintings on display reveal that he was driven by an uncertain and scattered revelation, which he understood imperfectly and only sometimes captured with his brush. What Constable described as Turner’s ‘wonderful range of mind’ is shown to range widely only by leaping barriers of common sense, jamming together firsthand impressions, classical mythology, contemporary events, forces of nature, steam power, private ambition, and national aspiration. Pumped up to see intimations of human destiny in a cloud of shifting appearances, Turner sought to clarify his intuitions in an exploratory use of concepts, paint materials, and techniques. Regulus (1828) shows him chancing his arm. A brilliant white light nearly obliterates the city of Carthage and its harbour, in sympathy with the doomed Roman hero Regulus. On Varnishing Day in 1837, the painter John Gilbert watched as Turner completely reworked Regulus: ‘He had a large palette and nothing on it but a huge lump of flake white: he had two or three biggish hog tools to work with, and with these he was driving the white into all the hollows and every part of the surface … The picture gradually became wonderfully effective, just the effect of brilliant sunshine absorbing everything.’ In Turner’s mature art, the tenets of art in his time – ideal story, correct drawing – were dispersed by the driving pulse of the artist’s informed intuition.

J.M.W. Turner, Regulus, 1828 (Tate)

Since Turner’s death, several interpretations have accrued to his art. The first large idea (in the artist’s lifetime) was John Ruskin’s, who perceived a mystical marriage in Turner’s art between the aspirations of British morality/morale and the forces of nature. Some decades later, Turner was recast as a proto-Impressionist who painted his sensation of nature. In the twentieth century, abstractionists honoured his focus on the creative processes of painting. Those several interpretations flow with the general culture, to be felt even by those coming fresh to the art (such as the young couple in Adelaide whose response is described below).

I saw the exhibition in Adelaide, with crowds of others. Most visitors joined a guided tour where, moving from work to work, they were told about the artist’s career, personal appearance and behaviour; painterly techniques, subjects, and effects; how a painting was received in Turner’s day, and how since. Guided tours do not allow for an unmediated encounter with works of art, but a young couple within earshot of me were making their own way through. Passing into the second room, the woman observed doubtfully that she liked to see figures. The paintings, however, were becoming progressively emptier, with figures reduced to mere scrawls in a fog of paint. The young man wondered, ‘was Turner becoming near-sighted?’ Their progress slowed, they spent longer before each painting, the joking stopped. Eventually, the man murmured that he liked one turbulent expanse of sea and sky. She stood for a long while before another work; he went to look, and said approvingly, ‘Wow!’ and, after reading the label, added enigmatically ‘it could be turned upside down without making a difference.’ These two appeared puzzled but also ‘taken’ by their experience of Turner’s paintings.

Did we need this exhibition’s inside view of a Turner struggling for supremacy and failing more often than not? Evidently the curator did, who has so skilfully put us within the belly of the artist; to hold our breath when a work succeeds and agonise over desperate errors of judgement. Exciting though the roller coaster is, the studio insight comes at the cost of the distanced public viewing that is ours by virtue of the passage of time. In 1996, Michael Lloyd was the curator of a Turner retrospective in Canberra that showed the art triumphing via its (time-based yet transcendent) aesthetic of the sublime. What Fernand Braudel said about the life of civilisations underlines Turner’s success: the mark of a living art, as of a living civilisation, is that it is capable of exporting its culture to distant times and places. Turner is dead. Long live Turner’s art.