William Blake:Method in his Madness. Tate Britain's Magnificent Exhibition Celebrates the Extraordinary imagination of a truly visionary artist
‘He that has never travelled in his thoughts and mind to heaven is no artist.’ No sketching tours and sojourns spent at aristocrats’ country piles for William Blake. No sublime landscapes of Cumberland or the West Country-the furthest he ventured out of London was a three-year stint in Sussex. Blake had more adventurous journeys in mind –literally- mysterious, enigmatic, terrifying encapsulations of visions, which apparently came to him at night from the age of just eight years old. Some argue he had what is known as eidetic memory which means you think that what you imagine is actually there. The ‘he’ referred to above was Sir Joshua Reynolds, the founding president of the Royal Academy, whom Blake described as being ‘hired to repress art’. It was hardly surprising then that the art establishment viewed him as, at best eccentric, or at worst a madman, and his talents remained largely disregarded during his lifetime.
Blake was certainly complicated, and even now his works continue to divide, befuddle and dazzle all at the same time. I confess my views have, in the past, been hijacked by a turgid English teacher in year 8, and ubiquitous poster reproductions of bearded longhaired prophets with six packs, bluetacked onto college bedroom walls. There is something a bit, dare I say, trippy about Blake, and to enter into Tate Britain’s latest show is to enter into the world of an artist who eschewed convention in favour of a seemingly boundless and fearless capacity to invent.
William Blake,is the most comprehensive exploration of the artist for a generation. It includes more than 340 works: paintings, drawings and prints, illuminated books as well as contributions from his contemporaries. It also provides a fascinating new focus on the significant role his wife Catherine played in Blake’s career; she helped him with printing his designs, colouring his prints, looked after the household and finances and, according to one friend, regularly ‘sang ‘sweetly’ to him.
In an unfashionable, yet most welcome chronological layout, the curators trace the life of Blake the poet, the painter, the engraver, and the Londoner, born in 1757, the son of a Soho hosier, who died seventy years later in squalid cramped rooms off the Strand.
William Blake, possible self-portrait, c 1802
His was truly revolutionary art, working against the backdrop of the social and political convulsions of the American and French Revolutions and the European wars which followed. In his own very particular and eccentric way, he projected the hopes and fears of his age.
What one is reminded of throughout the exhibition is how very small most of his works are, they were books after all. Vibrant illuminated manuscripts, which can be cradled carefully in the palm of a hand, full of fury, zeal and terror. Make sure you bring a magnifying glass. This intimacy draws us into Blake’s world, his other- worldly figures begin to make sense in this world, in ourworld: division, hypocrisy, faithlessness, faithfulness, Blake manages to get into the very depths of the worst and the best of us.
The exhibition brings together the highlights of Tate’s collection with many of his most famous pieces from other British collections along with some rarely seen international loans. In the best room, which arrives halfway through, we find some of his most famous images, his enigmatic cycle of 12 so-called “Large Colour Prints”, including Newton and Nebuchadnezzar,commissioned by one William Butts, a civil servant whose main job was to make sure the army had enough uniforms, but who had a sideline as a coal merchant and ran a girls boarding school with his wife. Picture the scene: Mr and Mrs Butts and the visual equivalent of heavy metal on the walls of their modest Soho house.
William Blake, Newton, 1795-c1805, Tate
Blake depicts Isaac Newton both as a man of science and a tyrannical figure, the architect of a clockwork universe, which Blake found so repellant. Newton’s scientific laws measured our world and therefore restricted humanity. His ‘science’ produced the miseries of the Industrial Revolution and the ‘dark satanic mills’ of Blake’s most famous poem, Jerusalem.. Yet Blake’s image has been reclaimed as a universal symbol of knowledge, appearing on the covers of science textbooks. Eduardo Paolozzi recreated it as a sculpture in 1995 to grace the forecourt of the British Library. Is this Blake’s ironic version of the perfect man, classical rippling muscles bursting from his marbled torso, responsible for all the ills of 18th century society?
William Blake, Nebuchadnezzar,1795-c1805,Tate
Hanging next to Newton in the exhibition is the bedraggled leonine King Nebuchadnezzar, driven mad and forced to live like a wild animal as a punishment for excessive pride. Perhaps these two breath-taking images were designed a a pair: Nebuchadnezzar a slave to emotional weakness, Newton a slave to Reason.
Around 1788 Blake invented a new form of printing in colour, combining text and image, painter and poet. He described it as his ‘infernal method’, which he claimed he had learnt from the ghost of his dead brother Robert. So his art came as a sort of added bonus to his verses neither of which gave him establishment kudos. He earned what little he did as an engraver, and sold his art to a small coterie of friends and supporters who were seduced by his fantastical, and for a time, risqué images. The earliest owners of Blake’s illuminated books included a number of rare book collectors, some of whom were dubbed ‘The Lunatics’. Another owner of Blake’s books, Isaac Disraeli, the father of the future prime minister, Benjamin, described how his guests would ‘desport’ themselves with Blake’s books,’beneath the lighted Argand lamp of his drawing room’ delighting in his engraved images of ‘angels,devils,giants,dwarves,saints,sinners,senators and chimney sweeps’. As T.S. Eliot later wrote in 1921, Blake was a ‘wild poet for the super-cultivated’.
William Blake, TheAncient of Days,1827
The exhibition ends with one of his most powerful images, The Ancient of Days,(1827), a figure from his imagination, Urizen, the man who measures the world at the moment of creation. Naked, bearded and sinuous, the old man leans out from the sun with vast compasses; a grim scientist measuring the world at the moment of creation, measuring what can never truly be measured. This work was coloured in the last days of Blake’s life and he declared it to be ‘the best I have ever finished’. He died in August 1827. An obituary in the Literary Chronicle exposed the conflicted contemporary view, that he was ‘one of those ingenious persons…whose eccentricities were still more remarkable than their professional abilities’. Blake would not have cared. In 1809, following a disastrous one-man show in London,he had written that ‘if a man is master of his profession, he cannot be ignorant that he is so; and if he is not employed by those who pretend to encourage art, he will employ himself, and laugh in secret at the pretences of the ignorant’
The genius of this Tate show lies in highlighting Blake the artist, who happened to write poetry on the side. The images unravel allegorical stories, like some elaborate graphic novel. He aspired to be a British Michelangelo but instead delved inwards into a furnace-like phantasmagoric world based on the Bible and his own poetry. His was not the art of his contemporaries such as Constable and Turner:poetical and atmospheric collaborations of clouds and sunlight on English landscapes. Blake’s oeuvre, instead, is of a man with an imagination on fire,struggling against the realities of being an artist in a commercial world and and trying to make sense of social and political changes way beyond his imaginings
A version of this article appears in the November edition of Standpoint Magazine
William Blake is at Tate Britain until February 2, 2020