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In the years when the Tate began to malign the memory of England's greatest painter in the undemocratic competition called the Turner Prize, the old gallery on Millbank held a series of specialised exhibitions with themes such as 'Turner and the Alps', 'Turner's Holland', 'Turner's Rivers of Europe', and so on.
Ian Warrell helped with these fine surveys and one of them, 'Turner and the Human Figure', was largely his work.
Warrell has now returned to the theme of the body by attempting to describe Turner's erotic drawings.
Warrell's essay is NOT an exhibition catalogue.
Nor can one imagine a good exhibition on the subject, so partial, unconsidered and often third-rate are the works of this sort.
It opens with foolish comments about Tracey Emin and Auguste Rodin, whose nude drawings were recently shown next to some of these Turners at the Turner gallery in Margate.
Turner had nothing in common with either of these later artists.
So what point does Warrell wish to make about nude erotic art?
Alas, he has nothing to say on the subject.
Warrell concentrates on the destruction of sexual scenes and frank "life studies" -- or 'studies from life', rather than the 'antique' -- that were among the immense number of drawings - about 19,000 - that Turner bequeathed to England when he died in 1851.
Some of them were incinerated.
Warrell's book is about this extreme censorship, described with help from the archives.
Sometimes arguing against the evidence he has obtained, Warrell's book has one focus, which amounts to a condemnation.
It is that John Ruskin, Turner's first and foremost critic, was behind the burning of Turner's erotic drawings.
The accusation has been made many times.
It is less than half-true.
Ruskin could not have burnt the drawings, because they were not his.
They belonged to the nation. The fact is that the offending sheets were destroyed by the National Gallery.
The actual burning was the work of Ralph Nicholson Wornum, a curator who acted for the Gallery's director, Sir Charles Eastlake.
Are records of Eastlake's decision preserved in Trafalgar Square?
Warrell does not know.
Perhaps he was not told.
But the possibility is that the National Gallery not only burnt Turner's drawings but also concealed or destroyed memoranda recording that it had done so.
The question must be passed to another scholar, who might have recourse to the Freedom of Information Act.
He or she would also be led into judicial history.
It is obvious that Wornum - who may have had a leading hand in the affair because Eastlake and Ruskin were not on speaking terms - was worried about the legality of his role.
It may have been against the law for the Gallery to possess 'obscene' material.
The one direct reference to Ruskin's part in the burning is in a letter to Wornum, in which Ruskin states: 'I am glad to be able to bear witness to their destruction, and I hereby declare that the parcel of them was undone by me, and all the obscene drawings it contained burnt in my presence in the month of December 1858.'
This sentence, quite unlike Ruskin's normal prose, was surely in reply to an appeal from Wornum for Ruskin's assistance in the event of legal problems.
There is only one other clue to Ruskin's involvement, an envelope on which is written, in his hand: 'Kept as evidence of the failure of mind only.'
Clearly, this points toward preservation rather than destruction.
Everything else in Warrell's account is derived from nineteenth-century gossip, and is unreliable.
His main sources, Charles Augustus Howell and Frank Harris, were vain fantasists.
As we know, the most voluble gossips report on other people with a knowingness that partly consists of self-congratulation.
They wink as they tell.
Such gossips do not value art as both Turner and Ruskin did.
So what - and here is the crucial point - was the culture that Turner wished to express, that troubled Ruskin and led to the lucifer matches being lit beneath drawings in, we suppose, some damp, safe basement of the National Gallery?
It was the relationship between art and human sensuality, a problem that worried the Victorians and has baffled all subsequent generations.
The question at issue is nude painting.
Ruskin - who wrote of 'anatomy', scarcely ever using the word 'nude' - believed that obsession with nakedness had damaged such a great mind as that of Buonarroti.
Perhaps he thought similarly about Turner, especially since the English artist's figural drawings are so weak, sometimes inept.
They are indeed a record of failure.
The superb landscapist had always wished to join the Old Masters through grand figurative painting.
The real theme of Warrell's selection of drawings is of Turner's frustration in preparing for that endeavour.
His nudes on paper are impatient with the demands of the Royal Academy "life" class, yet do not go beyond the limits of instruction.
However, we do see an occasional more relaxed view of the model's limbs.
And here and there a glimpse of pubic hair, which cheers the eye because of disobedience to the chilliness of marble.
Less appealing are a couple of pencil sketches that record a vagina and depict a woman performing fellatio.
These could be classed as 'erotic art', certainly, except that they do NOT wish to arouse their viewer, nor perhaps their artist.
And they don't!
They are, on the contrary, dispiriting; and, in general, erotic art is NEVER happy.
We should interpret Turner's eroticism as part of unhappiness in his life, whether that was because he never knew contented love, or because he strove to be considered among the great Old Masters.
Turner wished to be compared with Claude, and he did well in this.
Never, though, could he match his admired Rembrandt, who is the painter who best mixed sensuality with high aesthetic mastery.
Rembrandt was in Turner's eye and mind, as many of these drawings indicate, but could not be reached with his brush.
There is a tragic story in this chapter of the history of art, but Ian Warrell's book gives us only glimpses of that tragedy.
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