LONDON'Snewest grand art house is the recently opened Clore Gallery at the Tate, the fabled home of Britain's native painting and modern art collections. The Clore, named for its donor Sir Charles Clore, who died in 1979, fulfills a long-deferred wish to have a home for a huge trove of art left to the nation by Joseph Mallord William Turner, arguably the greatest pictorial genius produced by the island nation. His formal, Claude-like landscapes endear him to classicists, his great rhetorical visions of storm and deluge unleashed the Romantic sensibility, and his late work is so close to pure Abstract Expressionism that he is held as anearly precursor of modern art. He is, in short, universally admired.
On his death in 1851 he willed to the British nation the bulk of his artistic estate, including about 300 paintings and as many sketchbooks containing more than 20,000 drawings and watercolors. He stipulated that works must be hung in their own galleries, but otherwise the conditions of the will were impenetrably convoluted. To make matters worse, Turner's heirs contested the will, and the nation, embarrassed by riches, never quite figured out what to do with them. Parts of the collection have been on view at the Tate, the watercolors stored at the National Gallery, but aside from that, things just muddled along for about 135 years until the Clore Gallery opened