Visionary art smothered by worthy curating
William Blake Tate Britain, London SW1 ★★★★★
Have you ever tried reading the poetry of William Blake (17571827)? Not the good stuff, such as “The Tyger”, which is mercifully short. No, I’m talking about Blake’s bizarre epics: obscure, fire-and-brimstone mythologies of his own devising, starring allegorical figures with made-up names, like Urizen, the bearded embodiment of reason and law.
I remember trying to wade through Blake’s “prophetic books” at university: the experience was more torturous than attempting to master Anglosaxon. Maybe it’s just me. But Tate Britain’s comprehensive new survey suggests I am not alone.
Even during his lifetime, this son of a Soho hosier, who trained as an engraver before enrolling as a student at the Royal Academy of Arts, was
known for being wilfully esoteric, baffling and opaque. And that was the view among his supporters.
Those few collectors who did buy the hand-coloured “illuminated” books that Blake mostly printed during the 1790s while living in the London suburb of Lambeth, using a still-mysterious technique that he called “relief etching” (which allowed him to combine text and image on the same plate), did so not for their words but for the pictures.
Visiting Tate Britain, you understand why: Blake’s unique books are perversely small. Nobody in their right mind would print text in such an off-putting fashion. But his depiction of a tiny “tyger” is, if not “burning bright”, at least charmingly cuddly.
The Tate’s last big Blake show opened almost two decades ago, and focused on his activities as a radical artisan and printmaker. This reflected a recent shift in the scholarship, as attention turned from Blake’s writing to his vast output as a visual artist.
Since then, I’m not sure much has changed but, to differentiate itself, the new exhibition repositions Blake – presumably for publicity purposes – as an “artist for the 21st century”.
Hmm. I have my doubts that his arcane subject matter will engage people today: how relevant is, say, the Biblical figure of Lamech?
Still, the show argues that Blake was “21st century” in the sense that he had what we would now call a portfolio career. He earned a crust as a competent commercial engraver, leaving time to work on his own imaginative watercolours and write poetry in the evenings and at night.
At the same time, however, the show consistently attempts to “historicise” Blake, by embedding him in the social and professional networks of his day. For instance, we learn that he relied on a handful of patrons, including a minor civil servant, and the mistress of the Earl of Egremont. Meanwhile, labels repeatedly inform us what he was paid for specific pieces of work. This “historicising” approach contradicts the case for considering Blake as our contemporary. Moreover, the obsession with his finances diminishes his credentials as a visionary.
The exhibition has greater success when it shines a light upon his wife, Catherine, whom he married in 1782. Catherine may have been longsuffering (“I have very little of Mr Blake’s company; he is always in Paradise,” she once said), but she played a more prominent role in his art than has been hitherto understood – colouring his illuminated books and, posthumously, finishing his drawings.
There is no doubt that, with more than 300 artworks, this is a scholarly, in-depth show. But, more history lesson than drama, it never quite captures Blake’s peculiarity or rousing spirit. With one eye-catching exception – a recreation of his catastrophic exhibition of 1809 in which, by the magic of “augmented reality”, two of his now irredeemably murky tempera paintings are temporarily “restored” to their original gilded brilliance – it is disappointingly conventional.
The opening, which presents academic studies from his time at the RA, is especially dull. And because Blake’s primary medium was watercolour, which fades over time, many of the artworks on display are ghosts of their former glory.
There is also, throughout, a nagging sense of repetition. Visually, Blake was forever reshuffling the same old deck of cards, his figures either exaggeratedly muscle-bound (check out Eve’s abs in his illustrations to Paradise Lost), or preternaturally elongated and clad in swoopy, vaguely neoclassical gowns.
Blake’s compositions, meanwhile, are sometimes symmetrical, and often frontal and flat. As a result, his supernatural subjects have an unwelcome, at times borderline comic, staginess. Blake’s visions of the underworld, teeming with wraiths and satanic legions, like poorly paid extras, are hokey as, well, hell.
What, then, makes Blake worth revisiting? I’ll tell you: in one dominion of art – the ability to invent – he reigns supreme. Blake wasn’t a “painter” in the sense of his contemporaries, Constable and Turner. He lacked the virtuosic touch of, say, portraitist Thomas Lawrence, who once gave him £100 in cash when times were tough.
But, boy, was he blessed with a powerful imagination. Indeed, Blake was unparalleled as a maker of images, summoned from… where, exactly? That monstrous, scaly flea-ghost, strutting on a stage. His Satan, with red wings like a natty superhero’s cape. Newton, nude and hunched, forming the silhouette of a human brain. Nebuchadnezzar on all fours: a terrifying, bestial image of confinement and despair. Blake’s most memorable pictures have a curiously palpable, indestructible quality, as though they arrived in his brain hard-to-the-touch.
In the best room, we find his enigmatic cycle of 12 so-called “Large Colour Prints”. Their collective meaning has long perplexed scholars – but who cares? These breathtaking pictures do not appear drawn, brushed or even printed into being but, rather, invented – cast in the white-hot furnace of an incandescent mind.
From tomorrow until Feb 2; information: 020 7887 8888