Margate gallery to honour Turner is a 'blot on the landscape'

One of the country's leading experts on the painter J M W Turner has described a new £19m centre dedicated to the artist as a "hideous globule" set in a "daft place".

Andrew Wilton, former keeper of British art at the Tate Gallery and author of the definitive study on Turner's works, called for a halt to the construction of the centre in Margate, it was reported. He said the proposed gallery would mar the very view that Turner had immortalised.

The Turner Centre, designed by Lord Rogers's former associate Stephen Spence after the Norwegian firm Snohetta won the commission, is to be set in the sea – in the middle of the view depicted in the artist's 1830 Margate, Kent.

A massive curving shell of green oak, it will tower over the town's listed stone pier. Building work is due to start next year subject to planning permission being granted. The Arts Council has promised £4.1m towards the project.

Mr Wilton said: "Slap bang behind the old pleasure pier is a hideous globule. Don't they see that it's the one place it should not be?"

"It's not just in the town but in the harbour, which means it will spoil the view that Turner made famous and which is very much as it was when he painted it," he said.

The 19th-century master, who first visited Margate aged 11, returned regularly from the 1830s and spent the last years of his life living there.

The Turner Centre hopes to get works by the artist and his contemporaries on loan from other museums, including the Tate. A spokeswoman for the project said the Tate had been "fantastically supportive".

"The Tate has expressed a willingness to loan works as long as we can guarantee the safety of the artworks. That's an issue for the architects," she added.

Victoria Pomery, director of the Turner Centre and a former senior curator, said the project was about innovation, ambition and imagination. She said Turner would have appreciated it as a "forward thinker".

There were, Ms Pomery said, many aspects of the town which remained the same as they were in Turner's day but nevertheless "Margate has to move on".