Art s
Not like some immortal
John McEwen 1,h15 annus mirabilis of exhibitions continues with the most comprehensive ever dedicated to the work of William Blake (late Gallery till 21 May and then in a reduced form at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, 10 June-15 July). The Tate Possesses itself a fine collection of Blake, and of course in 1972 they mounted a small ibition of his illustrations to Gray's st(1)ems; but none of this prepares you for the . ear extent of the present exhibition, with extensive loans from America, the British Museum and numerous private coleelions. It marks a point of parity in our aPPreciation of Blake as an artist as well as a 111;oasetn,a crowning of art historical effort that try o . w developed into an academic „It has been a long struggle. George III, 7,110 had a better eye than most kings, cried lake them away! Take them away!' when slleiwo Blake's drawings, and even Flaxa all, me of the artist's greatest influences 4 \Yell as his patron, aired the prevailing artistic opinion of Blake's contemporaries wAllell he praised him only as an engraver. 11,d later opinions were often less flattering. Rodin, when told that Blake's vis,arY figures were literal representations s'ht what he had seen, merely grunted: 'Yes, the saw them once. He should have seen three or four times.' As for Churchill, his forties Lady Violet Bonham-Carter di is that the only Blake he had ever neard of was Mad Jack, the admiral. ac And so on; because, while Blake is now eted as a 'genius', few of us have read 4°fhis major works — the Book of tll"ia, the Book of Los, Milton — and r anY find his drawings, all those whirling erres with legs segmented and white as leken drumsticks, not to their taste at all. Justify their views his opponents, and in r,t/Ille cases his supporters, have, from his ntitne on, fabricated a whole mythology ‘i'nir stories that still serve to distract us from the work. There is the well-known scandal ,tihe artist being found playing at Adam 1111,,u with Mrs Blake in the summer, v711s, e of their London garden. There are his tillston of angels in Westminster Abbey and flea celebrated drawing of 'the ghost of a apparently done from the life. More Oently he was said to be Irish by Yeats and alled as old `Blakehead', father of flower 1c3irver and all it represented, by the tren1:st Poets of the 1960s. Meanwhile large ' caRbers of his supporters and opponents titar,v, always taken it for granted that he was By presenting his work with little writNI" exPlanation (outside the catalogue) and ithr,elY as a visual experience, Martin But" 8 exhibition endeavours to set the record straight. The order is basically chronological; the different sections marked by discreet changes of colour in the backdrops. There are no books, only individual pages. Stripped to essentials to this way certain things about the artist, till now only documented, become immediately apparent. Perhaps the most important, in terms of popular misconceptions, is that Blake did not spring from nothing like some immortal. His early years were spent as an apprentice engraver, during which time he made numerous drawings of the monuments in Westminster Abbey, and the structure of these gothic tombs is sometimes almost literally translated into the designs of his later work: most obviously at the Tate is an apprentice piece of the tomb of the Countess Aveline, the third earliest exhibit on view, which is transformed thirty years later into The Angel Rolling the Stone away from the Sepulchre', one of the most commonly reproduced of his biblical illustrations. To learn the Language of Art for Ever is my Rule', he wrote, and all his life he studiously copied the work of the artists he admired, notably Diner and Michelangelo, but his contemporaries too as a trip to the relevant gallery in the permanent collection, a very worthwhile post-exhibition exercise, abundantly makes clear: Flaxman, Fuseli (all those pointed feet and wild eyes), Barry (a genuine Irishman) and Benjamin West. In this Blake was, and remained, an eighteenth-century man, the wilder nineteenth-century flights of his Protestant evangelism checked by a Reynoldsian respect for classic art. For all the mystical power of his imagination' (when asked where he saw his visions he tapped his forehead), he is always a Protestant, a broad cloth man. His tradition is that of Milton and Bunyan, the Authorised Version and the Prayer Book, his taste at all times for a puritan clarity of expression. Many of his most apocalyptic or fanciful designs are literal renderings of descriptions in the text, as he himself was at pains to emphasise. Sometimes these can be charmingly humorous as when he illustrates Gray's lines describing the departure of two ladies who have left a visiting-card, Out of the window, whisk, they flew, But left a spell upon the table,
with two Jane Austen heroines, bonnets and all, gracefully diving arm-in-arm from an ivied casement. A passionate belief in such clarity made him rant against the painterliness of the Venetians and even Rembrandt, for all his religious simplicity. His own work, however delicate in colour and feeling, is bereft of this sensual indulgence. The idea of him and Mrs Blake in the nude is accordingly a chastening thought at best, and hippy visions of him as a preacher of free and communal love become equally preposterous. During the preparations for the present show the idea was mooted that appropriate Blakean food might be served in the restaurant for the duration of the exhibition, but researches only disclosed one reference to food in all his writings, and that only to a glass of milk and an apple, or something of the sort.
However if this gives Blake's work a slightly chilling austerity overall, it is frequently belied by individual instances of tenderness and great beauty, and invigorated by the power and invention of his compositions. Martin Butlin makes no secret of the varying standard of Blake's output as an artist and has accordingly tried to show only the very best. This has the beneficial effect of revealing the width of the artist's range. The neo-classical work of the 1790s for example has no connection with the bucolic woodcuts for Thornton's 'Virgil' of 1821 (which had such an influence on Palmer and his descendants), though both are masterpieces, quite different from those of his most familiar visionary style.
He was also a supreme graphic artist and a technically innovative engraver. His graphic invention is at its most dramatic in Night Thoughts, but it is nowhere more original than in the much quieter Songs of Innocence, in which he, uniquely in the history of books, wrote, printed and illustrated the text. These are various and weighty achievements, but throughout there are single sports of invention, like the empty room of 'A Vision: The Inspiration of the Poet', that must satisfy every taste. By pre senting the facts this exhibition makes Blake's achievement as an artist more awesome than even his hagiographers led us to believe.
Various books now on the market, quite apart from Martin Butlin's catalogue for the exhibition, hammer home the point. Most essentially, from the point of view of research and scholarship, there is the monstrous Complete Graphic Works of William Blake, introduced by David Bindman (Thames & Hudson £20), a complete annotated catalogue in black-and-white of every printed design by the artist. Some will miss the colour, but no doubt the costs of such an enterprise would have made it impractical, and Blake himself produced much of his work in monochrome. In any case this is not a coffee-table book but a reference work, displaying details, printing where possible to scale, and academically indispensable. Blake as an Artist, also by David Bindman (Phaidon £9.95) is another scholarly work, chronicling the life in terms of its artistic development, and admirably elucidating. Blake's own mythology as symbolised in the paintings and drawings, something previously undertaken only from a literary point of view, .The appendices are a thoughtful memory aid in this task, but this again is a specialist book. For a more gen eral readership Phaidon have recently pub
. lished Morton D. Paley's William Blake (£11.95), less specialised in that it has only seventy odd pages of text, the rest illustrations, including sixteen in colour. The colour printing is particularly disappointing, and not helped by the unsuitability of the originals selected, and the text is a bit undigested. By contrast Martin Butlin's brief introduction to the Tate catalogue is clarity itself, and though the colour here inclines to be faded or muddy, all 339 works in the exhibition are illustrated, legibly, and the annotation hits a nice balance of instruction and entertainment. At the price (£1.80 soft, £3.00 hard) it is a ludicrously good buy. Butlin's catalogue raisonne of Blake's works is due out later this year. For getting one's bearings, Mona Wilson's Lift, first published in 1927 and now reissued as a paperback at £1.95 by Paladin, remains remarkably undated and the best of its kind.
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