为配合一场具有重大意义的J.M.W.透纳艺术作品展而出版，本书将重点介绍透纳的当代图像，这是他整个职业生涯中最特殊和最独特的一面。它将探讨什么构成了现代性，以及在他的一生中，作为一个现代艺术家意味着什么。

包括雕塑家Phyllida Barlow的专为本书撰写的一篇文章，托人撰写的新文章将阐明罗丹的工作方式、造型的重要性以及摄影在其作品中的作用。

Published to accompany a landmark exhibition of the art of J.M.W. Turner, this publication will highlight Turner's contemporary imagery, the most exceptional and distinctive aspect of his work throughout his career. Rather than making any claims for Turner's protomodernist credentials, it will explore what constituted modernity, and what it meant to be a modern artist, in his lifetime. Turner's career spanned revolution and the Napoleonic War, Empire, the explosion of finance capitalism, the transition from sail to steam and from manpower to mechanisation, political reform and scientific and cultural advances that transformed society and shaped the modern world. While historians have long recognised that the industrial and political revolutions of the late eighteenth century inaugurated farreaching change and modernisation, these were often ignored by artists as they did not fit into established categories of pictorial representation. This exhibition and its accompanying publication will show Turner updating the language of art and transforming his style and practice to produce revelatory, definitive interpretations of modern subjects.