Volcano: Turner to Warhol
Compton Verney, until 31 October
On my desk is a lump of lava, a memento of Vesuvius. It doesn’t look like much, but neither does the volcano from the cinder track that winds around to its summit. From close to, Vesuvius is a giant ash heap; it’s from across the bay that the magic works.
Never does distance lend more enchantment to the view than in the case of volcanoes: when they’re exploding they’re plain dangerous, and when not they’re really rather dull. Their allure is as elusive as a rainbow’s, and it was in rainbow colours that Andy Warhol painted Vesuvius in 1985, making it look like a Neapolitan ice cream blown under pressure through the end of a cone.
Warhol’s ‘Vesuvius’ is only the most extreme variation on the volcanic theme in Compton Verney’s Volcano: Turner to Warhol, an exhibition of some 200 images and associated objects that takes us on an imaginative world tour of exploding mountains, from Heimaey to Nyiragongo and Cotopaxi to Fuji. It even shows us the knock-on effects of Krakatoa on Chelsea in a series of 1883 skyscapes by the Thames view painter William Ashcroft (sunsets were so lurid that fire engines were called out). But the show’s arrangement is not geographical or even historical. As befits its disaster movie title, it follows the volcano’s dramatic cycle from quiescence through eruption to regeneration.
This last phase is what attracts volcano-dwellers, but not tourists. The birth of volcano tourism coincided with the Romantic era, to which the earth’s magma apparently responded with a sympathetic spurt of activity. But not all volcano painters witnessed eruptions. Turner’s ‘Eruption of the Souffrier Mountains in the Island of St Vincent’ (1815) was painted from a drawing by a local plantation owner — and looks a little like the Lake District with lava bombs — while Joseph Wright of Derby’s convincingly gestural sketch of ‘Vesuvius in Eruption’ predated the big event of 1778 by four years.
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