Blake at Tate

Blake at Tate

It is necessary for most people to be a bit picky when it comes to appreciating William Blake, who is the deserved subject of a large exhibition at Tate Britain (a "Blakebuster"?). Very few are those who have the patient scholarship to follow his art and writing through all their intricate visionary philosophies. Not many more, I should guess, fall into the category of general readers that, with the help of those scholars, have a good understanding of the preoccupations of his esoteric works.

Why make the effort? There’s surely no compelling reason to get to close grips with Blake’s idiosyncratic mix of political radicalism, non-conformist Christianity and strange spiritual insights into the true reality of the World. Many of Blake’s contemporaries considered him to be mad, if a genius. Even if we avoid that judgment in its literal terms, it’s reasonable to think of him as an outlier far, far beyond the norms of common perception and thought when looking at his work.

For me, this means that I glaze over when confronted by Blake’s “Big Books”- his long mythological poems such as Jerusalem (not to be confused with the rugby anthem, now of the same name, which has been extracted from the larger work) and Milton. Neither text nor illustrations (with several astonishing exceptions; Blake really did “see” his visionary creatures in extraordinary detail) have much impact.

Blake’s early “Little Book” – Songs of Innocence and Experience is another matter. It is beautiful, heartfelt, direct and very moving (and full of lasting poetry and art, if you can forgive the pussycat Tyger).

Blake’s response to everything- his inner poetic vision, current philosophies and other poet’s work- is always astonishingly intense and creative- perhaps never matched. His art is most accessible when engaging with generally familiar texts – the Bible, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Gray’s poems. 

Here one can readily appreciate an imagination that at once bursts with fecund detail, both beautiful and scary, and, yes, witty; and seems to contain the seeds of much that has followed in the subsequent history of art.

This observation may be a trite anachronistic back projection. But maybe not: Blake’s direct influence on modern artists, and writers, of all stripes, is profound.

A random selection of favourite images..

There’s the geometrical assault of  David Delivered out of Many Waters, which knocks one out with the fivefold stares.

There’s the illustration to Gray’s Elegy

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day

...and leaves the world to darkness and to me

Darkness in the shape of a Japanese Manga spirit swoops over and towards the pensive poet.

There are more lovely and intricate illustrations to this famous poem; but Blake is at his comic best in illustrating Gray’s mock heroic verses about the death of a cat that falls into a goldfish pond whilst attempting to fish for the goldfish. Blake switches the creatures between the animal, faery and the human: vain and rapacious cat/girl/dead soul; triumphant fish/warriors..

Blake’s illustrations for Dante were unfinished at his death. We are left with watercoloured drawings, mostly suggesting with relish the torments of Hell. But to me the most moving are the liminal – the approach of Dante and Virgil to the outer Gates of Hell (Abandon Hope..)

and the wonderful colours and perspective of the approach to Purgatory (imagined by Dante as an island in Southern Ocean).

The images noticed above are not all on the Exhibition’s postcards and posters. But to me they represent the subtle, as opposed to the strident, virtues of Blake.

Al final: I had not realised that Blake was a pioneer of video art. But the exhibition has a vast screen for the projection, in hugely blown up and therefore meaningless detail, of panning shots of what Blake wanted to be public monumental art on a large scale – his somewhat anomalistic pictures of Nelson and Pitt (the prime minister) during the era of the Napoleonic wars. This project never succeeded, which may just as well for Blake’s reputation as a radical pacifist.

Sept 2019