John Martin is a figure who was fascinating and complex and produced some of the most spectacular pictures in the history of art. Hugely popular in his time, he was derided by the Victorian art establishment as a 'people's painter', for although he excited mass audiences with his astounding scenes of judgement and damnation, to critics it was distasteful. In a sense ahead of this time, his paintings - full of rugged landscapes and grandiose theatrical spectacle - have an enduring influence on today's cinematic and digital fantasy landscapes. Martin's work has appeared on heavy metal album covers and special effects man Ray Harryhausen has described Martin as ‘the father of modern cinema’...
From a review in The Guardian:
Organised in partnership with the Laing gallery, Newcastle, this is the first major exhibition dedicated to Martin's work in over 30 years. The exhibition will showcase some of his best known oil paintings of apocalyptic destruction and biblical disaster from collections around the world, including Belshazzar’s Feast 1820 (on loan from a private collection and not seen in public for over 20 years) as well as previously unseen and newly-restored works such as Pompeii.Imagining the worst: that was Martin's speciality. The tower of Babel collapses. Sodom and Gomorrah are obliterated. Etna erupts – look behind you! – and Pompeii is engulfed. Babylon falls, and Nineveh, and Jericho, and pandemonium is naturally unleashed. The contents of the Book of Revelations are fully illustrated, along with Exodus and Paradise Lost – thrilling, edifying and over the top in roughly equal measure.
Martin found form quite early in his career, which began as a painter of inn signs, glass and crockery (the surviving dinner plate is in this show). For all the compositional variations, the essentials do not alter greatly: dizzying height and depth, colossal skies dwarfing whichever culture is seconds from destruction, an unimaginably cavernous space opening in the back of each image. Huge armies are pitted against tiny solo figures. Plunging gorges have their circling eagles, approaching infernos are reflected in polished objects in the foreground, the skylines of ancient cities recede in rectilinear perspective, mocked by the swirly doom-clouds above.
Every comparison you can think of is obvious and true. Martin's paintings anticipate biblical epics and disaster movies and CinemaScope; sci-fi illustrations, concept albums and heavy-metal graphics; Spider-Man (look at the boneless figure of Sadak somehow slithering up a rock as big as a skyscraper) and the avatars of video games. Film directors have acknowledged the immense debt, from DW Griffith to Cecil B DeMille and Roland Emmerich.
The Guardian has a sneak preview of some of the paintings here
Catch this exhibition if you can...it promises to be truly spectacular!