Of certain artists it may truly be said that they remain,
both in their life and their work, a considerable conundrum long after they
have been elevated to the status of a classic. The English poet and painter
William Blake (1757-1827), whose work is currently the subject of a remarkable
exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has often been perceived to be an
artist of this sort. Devoting his multiple talents to a profoundly personal
universe of discourse, in which all distinction between history and myth,
between earthly life and divine providence, is suspended in favor of visionary
archetypes and apocalyptic prophesy, Blake may indeed strike us as defying easy
comprehension once we attempt to move beyond the most accessible of his lyric
poems and pictorial images.
At least part of the difficulty in coming to terms with
Blake is a tendency to place his work in the wrong company. As a poet, he
stands at a considerable distance from his contemporaries among the English
Romantics. A familiarity with Keats, Shelley
and Byron, all of whom he outlived, doesn’t take us very far in penetrating the
mysteries of Blake’s prophetic books. A knowledge of the Bible, however, is
indispensable, and so is a close acquaintance with the poetry of John Milton,
especially Paradise Lost , and with
the poetry and prose of the Elizabethans.
As a painter, engraver
and illustrator, Blake is equally distant from the major English visual artists
of his time, whatever his tangential relation may have been to such minor
figures as Henry Fuseli and John Flaxman. With the greatest English painters of
his day-John Constable and J.M.W. Turner-he had nothing whatever in common. In
his pictorial art, Blake occupied a private planet of his own.
He was a radical and a
mystic in his every interest and endeavor-in his politics and his theology as
well as in his poetry and painting-and he was radically original, too, in the
principal ambition of his life, which was to combine the resources of poetry,
painting and printing in a single medium, the illustrated printed book, which
would address the mind as a spiritual revelation.
This was indeed a very
large ambition, and so was Blake’s attempt to model the mythic protagonists of
his pictorial narratives on the heroic draftsmanship of Michelangelo. The
inevitable reduction of that heroic mode of draftsmanship to the scale of the
printed page was clearly not a problem for Blake, but it sometimes is for the
viewer of his pictorial illustrations, especially in the smallest sheets that
require a magnifying glass to be comfortably studied. (At the Met, some
magnifying glasses have been thoughtfully provided, but you might want to bring
your own if you want to read Blake’s combination of words and images and not
merely look at them.)
That Blake’s pictorial
gifts were on a far smaller scale than Michelangelo’s hardly needs saying. But
it does pose certain problems for the viewer of Blake’s art in a public
exhibition. Even in the tiniest of his printed sheets, there is a concentration
of graphic detail that requires a comparable degree of concentration from the
viewer. And in the larger painted and printed works, there is a similar
accretion of detail and drama that at times seems almost to overflow the
boundaries of the work itself. It’s as if the artist was determined to contain
an entire cosmology in the smallest possible space, and the miracle-not the
only one in Blake’s art-is that these teeming pictorial images tend to expand
in scale in our own visual memory of them. When we revisit such images, it is
sometimes a shock to see how much smaller they are than our visual memory of
them has led us to expect.
As for the meaning of
Blake’s art, that too is not without its problems for the contemporary reader
and viewer. As a poet-and it was, after all, as an illustrator of his own
poetry that Blake produced the bulk of his pictorial art-he looked upon the
modern world as “fallen” in the Christian sense of that term, though he was
anything but an orthodox Christian in his religious beliefs. The materialism of
the modern world was anathema to him, and thus in urgent spiritual need of
redemption. Hence his affinity for symbols of redemption, which at various
stages of his development he found in his own imaginative interpretation of
Jerusalem, America and the French Revolution. In his politics and his religious
views as well as in his poetry, he was an allegorist of good and evil, and some
of the figures he was most concerned to revile-Sir Isaac Newton, for example-do
not seem to most of us to have been the agents of the devil that Blake believed
them to be.
But for the objectivity
of science or the human benefits to be derived from commerce and industry,
Blake had no patience at all. They did not comport with what T.S. Eliot once
described as Blake’s “gift of hallucinated vision.” Or, as Blake himself once
wrote: “I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create.” And create
he did, one of the strangest and most perplexing literary and pictorial oeuvres that we know.
The William Blake exhibition, which was organized by Tate Britain in
London, remains on view at the Met through June 24. Visitors to the exhibition
would do well, I think, to acquaint themselves with Blake’s poetry before
seeing this show, for without some knowledge of the poetry much of the exhibition
is likely to remain a mystery. Even then, however, they should not expect for
all the mystery of William Blake to be perfectly understood.
