'Black on Maroon? by Mark Rothko

Don't even think about a trip to the Clore Gallery to see Turner/Rothko – an even more meagre display, purporting to highlight the similarities between the English landscape painter and the American Abstract Expressionist.

The comparison is specious. Hanging Turner's Three Seascapes of c1827 next to a typical Rothko isn't just dumb, it's misleading. Turner painted three studies of a stormy sea and sky on a single canvas, one on top of another. To treat them as a single work of art enables the curator to compare them to the bands of colour which form the entire composition of a Rothko, but it is disingenuous.

Back in 1966, the painter and critic Lawrence Gowing mounted an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in which he presented Turner as an abstract painter, an honorary forebear of New York's Abstract Expressionist school. But for a long time it has been acknowledged that Gowing misunderstood Turner, whose finished pictures are not only representational, but positively groan with allusions to history, literature, art and philosophy.

So, when Rothko said, "This man Turner, he learnt a lot from me", he was making what art historians call a "joke". Turner, more than any other English artist with the exception of Blake, needs the written word to make his highly symbolic pictures fully comprehensible.

Now there's an idea! Instead of this adolescent nonsense, what about a long overdue exhibition that looks at the many and real similarities between the art of Blake and Turner?

Read Richard Dorment's review of the William Blake exhibition at the Tate Britain.