The wonderfully weird world of William Blake at the Getty
outstretched arms that wield a pointed spear and shield, backed by rolling waves of fire lighting up the darkness.
The figure hovers over Eve’s body, laid out flat on the ground in silhouette. An apple is tucked beneath the open fingers of her hand, and her head is tossed back in a death that summons up an intimation of exhausted sexual ecstasy. A monstrous serpent coils around Eve’s body, its tangled tail by her feet mimicking the splayed curls of her hair at the other extreme; the beast’s dragon-like head rests on her breast.
What’s exceedingly strange about the stunningly composed image is Blake’s choice not to emphasize the wages of sin — that is, death — given a barely articulated corpse confined to the lowest register. (She’s less than a sixth of the composition.) Instead, the focus is aimed squarely on Satan’s gratified rejoicing in his triumph as mortality’s instrument, effectively heroic in a pictorial pose of “ta-da!” (Blake used the spread-arm pose a lot.) The artist makes the scene virtually operatic, the famous British gift for theatricality turned up to a melodramatic high. Satan takes up more than half the page, his serpentine surrogate below further enlarging the demon’s prominence.
“Satan Exulting Over Eve” was made through an elaborate process. Using a sticky concoction of opaque watercolors, Blake drew the image on a stiff board. He used the drawing as a kind of printing plate, stamping it onto a sheet of paper, almost like a monoprint. Ink and transparent colors were then applied to provide a detailed picture, the filminess allowing the support to reflect light and generate a subtle glow from within. Blake had long earned his living as a commercial printer — he was 38 when he made the exulting-Satan work — and he was both expert at employing standard printing methods and inventive in concocting new ones.
In works like this, Blake brings together the muscularity of Michelangelo’s drawing, the formal crispness of Raphael, Albrecht Dürer’s commitment to printmaking as a modern form and an almost medieval mysticism that predated Renaissance rationality. Since he never traveled around Europe to see other art firsthand, as was common for artists at the time, Blake knew those predecessors’ works largely through copied engravings and some isolated examples in private aristocratic collections. Limited or not, his familiarity with past art inspired new visions.
The Getty exhibition, organized by assistant curator of drawings Edina Adam and senior curator of drawings Julian Brooks, is a trimmed version of a huge one put on by Tate Britain in London, which was scuttled in 2020 by the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the excellent catalog, it’s the first loan exhibition of Blake’s work to be seen on the West Coast in 80 years.
It includes “The Ghost of a Flea,” Tate’s rarely loaned, murky miniature painting in dark tempera and gold on hardwood panel starring a monstrous, human-insect hybrid looking hungrily into a bucket of blood. From the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Conn., comes a full set of 18 works from “America a Prophecy,” a book of poetry wrapping text with imagery, inspired by the revolutionary fervor erupting across the Atlantic Ocean against the British crown. (On one page, a king is said to cower when confronted by Orc, spirit of revolution, but Blake was careful to leave King George’s name out of it, fearful of being charged with sedition.)
There’s also Blake’s only self-portrait, a bust-length, frontal drawing in soft pencil and fluid gray wash in which the fixed stare of the artist’s crisply rendered eyes might be thought to emit invisible electromagnetic energy beams. He’s got you in his sights.
The self-portrait is making its United States debut, 220 years after the fact. (It has barely been shown in the U.K. — odd, given the artist’s superstar status there.) Helpfully, the museum provides several magnifying lenses throughout the exhibition, which aid in close scrutiny of detailed pictures. There’s a delicacy to Blake’s touch, which butts up against the work’s sometimes dark, often apocalyptic imagery. The tension resounds.
This is the artist, after all, whose poem, now called “Jerusalem,” famously took note of the hell being produced by Britain’s roaring industrial revolution — the steadily advancing mechanization he described as creating “dark Satanic mills,” depriving poor people of their livelihood while fouling the land. Blake was a fierce critic of the social and spiritual costs of rampant, unrestrained industrial manufacturing. Yet he didn’t paint nearly as often as he made prints — the pictorial art that requires one sort of machine or another as part of its production. Rather than pretending that such debilitating economic transformations could be stopped, he chose to make art that stands as a pointed and articulate alternative.
Blake left school at the age of 10, having learned to read and write, and he was apprenticed at 14 to a commercial engraver. He read widely on his own, developing a highly individual and personal worldview. Although he studied at the Royal Academy, he reviled its first president, Sir Joshua Reynolds, who not only represented the British art establishment, but was instrumental in constructing it.
Blake was largely unsuccessful as an artist in his lifetime. An 1809 exhibition that he desperately organized to market his work was notoriously panned in its single review as offering “wretched pictures” produced by “an unfortunate lunatic.”
At the Getty, on the other hand, we get a reasoned procession of five sections. They are devoted to Blake’s labor as a professional printmaker working for others; an independent artist working on his own; an inventor of distinctive techniques; a figure with one foot in and one foot out of the British art world; and, finally, a visionary.
The endlessly imaginative result makes for an exhibition both unexpected and timely. In the tumultuous context of industrial revolution, think of Blake as artisanal. Today’s bloodless digital revolution, which has been disrupting things for a generation, is now being met by a wave of artists who insist on giving handmade qualities a platform. Blake, nutty or not, stands front and center as a valuable predecessor.