Displaying full measure of the man

Turner show is overwhelming and moving

''Peace - Burial at Sea'' is one of 150 works by J.M.W. Turner on display at the Met.

NEW YORK - The pinched, at times resentful response of several influential critics to the J.M.W. Turner exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, due to close in just over a week, hints at a new kind of negative sensibility in the art world: a suspicion of undisguised ambition, an impatience with virtuosity, and a dread of the full-blown sublime.

It may also betray unrealistic expectations about an artist who has long been celebrated as a progenitor of modern art, but who was, it turns out, a man of his time: an unapologetic peddler of myth, anecdote, and allegory - a throw-it-all-in kind of guy - right to the end of his life.

Reviewing the Turner show in the New York Review of Books, John Updike reported seeing visitors "stagger[ing] from the final chamber into the gift shop's welcoming arms as if after a tussle in a cave." Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker described the experience as "hot and bothersome," "a barrage of guileful effects," while Roberta Smith, in The New York Times, hedged that the show will "either win you over or wear you out." In the end, she concluded, one came out "impressed, but oddly untouched, even chilled."

Turner was a freak phenomenon, no doubt. And yes, strolling through well-lit, air-conditioned galleries can be taxing. But spare a thought for Turner himself! The man was almost dementedly footloose. Nowhere in England, according to the artist's biographer James Hamilton, is further than 40 miles from the subject of a Turner landscape. And let's not forget the Continent, which he traversed repeatedly, from Calais to Venice and Rome via the Alps.

This show, jointly organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Met, can be overwhelming at times, it's true. Something about the regimented layout of the Met's long halls thwarts one's inclination to plug in to Turner's many different moods. It's a contrast to 2003, when a slew of exhibitions singling out particular aspects of his oeuvre - "Turner's Britain," "Turner and Venice," "The Sun Rising Through Vapor: Turner's Early Seascapes," and "Turner: The Late Seascapes" - were displayed concurrently in Birmingham, Manchester, and London. I saw all four shows over the course of two days, and emerged convinced that slicing Turner up into manageable portions is the way to go.

But with its 150 paintings and watercolors, this exhibition is a rare opportunity to get the measure of the whole man. Incredibly, it is the first major retrospective devoted to Turner in the United States.

Today, we like to sigh over Turner's penchant for vague and atmospheric effects. We respond especially to the sunsets, the storms at sea, and the views of Venice that he painted in oils and watercolor (a medium he revolutionized) toward the end of his career.

But, wanting to see Turner as an embryonic version of modern abstract artists, we mistake his late paintings' real nature. Far from being empty and incident-free, these evanescent images happen to comment on everything from Britain's immigration policy to the whaling industry, post-Napoleonic politics, Old Testament tales, classical myths, and the sheer, salty heroism of ordinary people making a living from the sea. They ask a lot of the modern viewer.

Take "Peace - Burial at Sea," a late masterpiece from 1842. An imagined re-creation of the burial off Gibraltar of Turner's friend and rival, the Scottish painter Sir David Wilkie, the painting looks radically pared back at first glance. We see high cirrus clouds against an evening sky, the silhouette of two ships, one painted deep black obscuring the other, and a placid, reflective sea.

But look closer and much more emerges. A bird is taking off in the foreground. The moon creates a burst of gaseous light through the clouds and reflects thinly off the water. A smaller craft can be seen off to the right. To the left, in the distance (presumably in the port of Gibraltar), a flare is going off. And a lantern poignantly irradiates the smoky atmosphere between the two ships where the burial is taking place.

Wilkie had died the previous year on his return from the Middle East. British officials at Gibraltar refused to accept his body for burial, fearing he had contracted cholera - hence the burial at sea.

But the painting does far more than sound a note of lament for Turner's lost friend. It is infused with a heroic spirit that transcends the memory of any one person. Indeed, Turner transforms this very particular incident into nothing less than a meditation on Art, which he saw as civilization's defense against war (he lived through the full span of the Napoleonic Wars) and a continuation of a grand history of noble creation going back to the ancients.

To the painting's title, Turner (who could never leave well enough alone), added two lines of verse from his own unpublished poem "The Fallacies of Hope": "The midnight torch gleamed o'er the steamer's side/ And merit's corse was yielded to the tide."

So the painting is not just an aesthetic experience in the manner of, say, a painting by Whistler or Rothko. It is a dense visual poem, a kind of heroic elegy.

Turner is constantly doing this: asking us to hold more than one thing in our heads, more than one layer of emotion in our hearts, at any given time. He will conjure the sublime with streaming skies, indigo cloud banks suffused with orange light and luminous fog drifts. And in the same painting, he will break our hearts with a brilliant evocation of the pre-dawn, chattering intimacy of fishermen and fishmongers by the beach.

It's the sheer scope of the work that impresses. But I find it moving, not chilling.

Sadly, the show includes too many of the late works. Experimental in nature, they are not all great, and they begin to blur.

Worse, it is missing some of Turner's greatest paintings, including the Clark Art Institute's "Rockets and Blue Lights (Close at Hand) to Warn Steam Boats of Shoal Water" and two masterpieces from the National Gallery in London: "Sun Rising Through Vapor: Fishermen Cleaning and Selling Fish" and "The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to her Last Berth to be Broken Up."

The last two have inspired ambitious homages by Lucian Freud and Cy Twombly, respectively. Olafur Eliasson, whose smashingly successful "The Weather Project" in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in 2003-04 immediately brought to mind Turner's sunsets, is another contemporary star inspired by Turner.

For all these very diverse artists, different aspects of Turner's achievement appeal: ample evidence, surely, of his genius.

Sebastian Smee can be reached at ssmee@globe.com.