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The Guardian view on Turner and Constable: radical in different ways | Editorial

Capturing the changing landscapes of the 18th century, the rivals transformed British art. The climate emergency gives new urgency to their work

JMW Turner appears on £20 notes and gives his name to Britain’s most avant garde contemporary art prize. John Constable’s work adorns countless mugs and jigsaws. Both are emblematic English artists, but in the popular imagination, Turner is perceived as daring and dazzling, Constable as nice but a little bit dull. In a Radio 4 poll to find the nation’s favourite painting, Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire – which even features in the James Bond film Skyfall – won. Constable’s The Hay Wain came second. Born only a year later, Constable was always playing catch-up: Turner became a member of the Royal Academy at 27, while Constable had to wait until he was 52.

To mark the 250th anniversary of their births, Tate Britain is putting on the first major exhibition to display the two titans head to head. Shakespeare and Marlowe, Mozart and Salieri, Van Gogh and Gauguin – creative rivalries are the stuff of biopics. Mike Leigh’s 2014 film shows Turner (Timothy Spall) adding a touch of red to his seascape Helvoetsluys to upstage Constable’s The Opening of Waterloo Bridge at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1832. Critics delighted in dubbing them “Fire and Water”. The enthralling new Tate show is billed as a battle of rivals, but it also tells another story. Constable’s paintings might not have the exciting steam trains, boats and burning Houses of Parliament of Turner’s, but they were radical too.

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© Photograph: Guy Bell/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Guy Bell/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Guy Bell/Shutterstock

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Turner v Constable: Tate Britain exhibition invokes long history of artistic rivalries

From Michelangelo and Leonardo to Picasso and Matisse, bitter feuds have defined art. But are contemporary artists more collaborative than their renaissance predecessors?

“He has been here and fired a gun,” John Constable said of JMW Turner. A shootout between these two titans would make a good scene for in a film of their lives, but in reality all Turner did at the 1832 Royal Academy exhibition was add a splash of red to a seascape, to distract from the Constable canvas beside it.

That was by far the most heated moment in what seems to us a struggle on land and sea for supremacy in British art. It’s impossible not to see Tate Britain’s new double header of their work this way. For it is a truth universally acknowledged, to paraphrase their contemporary Jane Austen, that when two great artists live at the same time, they must be bitter and remorseless rivals. But is that really so, and does it help or hinder creativity?

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© Composite: Tate, National Portrait Gallery, London

© Composite: Tate, National Portrait Gallery, London

© Composite: Tate, National Portrait Gallery, London

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Faut-il aller voir Zootopie 2 au cinéma ce week-end ? Voici notre avis sur le dernier film Disney

Près de 10 ans plus tard, Nick Wilde et Judy Hopps reprennent du service pour la suite de ce film Disney qui avait conquis le public, ainsi que la critique. Zootopie 2, en salles depuis le 26 novembre 2025, est-il à la hauteur de cet immense héritage ? Voici notre critique, garantie sans spoilers, sur ce Disney de Noël plutôt atypique.

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Faut-il aller voir Zootopie 2 au cinéma ce week-end ? Voici notre avis sur le dernier film Disney

Près de 10 ans plus tard, Nick Wilde et Judy Hopps reprennent du service pour la suite de ce film Disney qui avait conquis le public, ainsi que la critique. Zootopie 2, en salles depuis le 26 novembre 2025, est-il à la hauteur de cet immense héritage ? Voici notre critique, garantie sans spoilers, sur ce Disney de Noël plutôt atypique.

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From Dylan Thomas’ shopping list to a note from Sylvia Plath’s doctor: newly uncovered case files reveal the hidden lives of famous writers

Exclusive: Hardship grant applications to the Royal Literary Fund, including unseen letters by Doris Lessing and a note from James Joyce saying that he ‘gets nothing in the way of royalties’, show authors at their most vulnerable

Tobacco, swiss roll, Irish whiskey, Guinness and monkey nuts: that’s the diet followed by one of the foremost poets of the 20th century.

Dylan Thomas’ grocery bill is among a trove of famous writers’ personal documents and letters – many of which are as yet unseen by the public, and have been exclusively shown to the Guardian – discovered in the case files of a literary charity.

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© Photograph: Courtesy of the Royal Literary Fund

© Photograph: Courtesy of the Royal Literary Fund

© Photograph: Courtesy of the Royal Literary Fund

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New film adaptation of Camus’s L’Étranger opens old colonial wounds

François Ozon’s handling of classic novel draws both praise and criticism, including from the author’s daughter

More than 80 years after it was published, Albert Camus’s L’Étranger remains one of the most widely read and fiercely contested French books in the world.

Until now, few attempts have been made to adapt the novel, published in English as The Outsider, for television or cinema: it is considered problematic and divisive for its portrayal of France’s colonisation of Algeria.

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© Photograph: Ent-movie/Alamy

© Photograph: Ent-movie/Alamy

© Photograph: Ent-movie/Alamy

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