Heavenly bodies
William Blake’s celestial paintings and prints are the stars of a new exhibition at Tate Britain
Ahead of his time, yet rooted in the centuries of artistic and literary tradition that preceded him, painter, printmaker and poet William Blake (1757-1827) created some of the most iconic images in British art.
Many of us first encountered Blake through the words of his 1800s poem, ‘And did those feet in ancient time…’, lines that went almost unnoticed until set to music more than 100 years later as a World War II rallying cry. But William Blake, as Tate Britain’s new exhibition will soon demonstrate, was about so much more than Jerusalem.
Blake created his allegorical visions of heaven and hell, in poetry and pictures. His mastery of the human
form references Renaissance religious art alongside comment on his own times – he was a vociferous critic of the Industrial Revolution’s ‘Satanic mills’. Blake wasn’t short of ambition, but didn’t receive the exposure he deserved in his lifetime. The Tate’s exhibition aims to right that wrong.
Pity (above) is among the many highlights in the exhibition’s 300 or so works, and is one of 12 ‘large colour prints’, as Blake termed them, that will be displayed together. ‘These represent Blake’s most ambitious and remarkable inventions in printmaking,’ says curator Martin Myrone, ‘using a combination of different methods to create densely coloured images that he referred to as frescos.’ In Pity, a literary metaphor from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, (‘pity like a naked newborn babe’) is given bodily form – a typical Blake device. ‘The imagery is characteristically striking, with elongated forms and dramatic contrasts of light and dark,’ adds Myrone. ‘The 12 prints show Blake attempting to create a powerful cycle of imaginative images, like Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, using the relatively modest means available to him - paper, paint and ink.’
William Blake, 11 September 2019– 2 February 2020, Tate Britain, tickets £18 (concessions available), visit tate.org.uk for more details.