William Blake at Tate Britain

     I've just returned from a hectic two night stay in London. First port of call Tuesday afternoon was the British Museum and a fruitless search for Greco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek art. Not sure the guides quite knew what I was actually looking for. That evening I attended the annual TAG Awards at the Art Workers Guild in Queen Square. Viscount Linley presented the prizes. It was good to catch up with friends.

     Wednesday was almost entirely given over to exhibitions. I came up to town intending to do just two: William Blake at Tate Britain and David Inshaw at the Redfern Gallery in Cork St.. In the end I did five. My first port-of-call was The Tate. I have to confess to still attempting to calibrate my response to this exhibition which contains some of the most incredible, moving and disturbing art I've ever yet seen, painted by a man, a mystic of sorts who saw spiritual beings, God himself once, from his childhood onwards. I have to confess I can't recall ever seeing any work by Blake 'in the flesh' before this exhibition (though I suppose I must have done) and I don't think any amount of reproduction in books and the media can prepare you for the sheer force of some of the art on display here. It really is astounding. I really can't recommend a visit enough. You will be amply rewarded by what you see; disturbed may be but a little of that won't do you any harm. I should say here that stylistic breadth of the work is very large from the fey to the profound; the techniques however cover a smaller, tighter range being mostly print, watercolour and egg-tempera. I suspect that the exhibition presents itself at an opportune time in the culture, arriving at a moment of increased interest in the occult, and the spiritual in general, the psychedelic, and at the nascence of a Jungian revival vis Jordan Peterson. For this is an art that admits us to another realm - "I give you the end of a golden string," said Blake of himself, "only wind it into a ball and it will lead you to Heaven's Gate." It is a place at once fabulous and frightening, that I feel doesn't just represent the imaginative world of Blake's own mind, his own psyche, his own sub-conscious, but contains something more universal, something indeed more, dare I say, objective. And it is that utterly compelling quality that it gives this art its 'terror'.
     As I was walking around, gadfly-like sampling this and that without order, I kept thinking of the paintings of both Carl Jung and J R R Tolkien, who both underwent spiritual crises at roughly the same time in the early twentieth century which brought for work that was, and is, passing strange. Both Jung and Tolkein placing their creative and spiritual insights in 'Red Books'. Blake too produced prophetic books. There are even flashes, no more, of stylistic congruity between the three but these are, I have to say, rare. It goes without saying that, obviously, Blake was the greater artist, but having said that it not an easy art to place stylistically to what had immediately gone before except in its Neo-classicism, which is oddly persistent throughout his career. For Blake's work is not only so personal as to defy categorisation, but comes at the end of the long Whig century with all its complacencies, the age of Reason and Sensibility, against which Blake was in such conscious rebellion. It may owe something to contemporary French neo-classical art, but it must be remembered that Blake did own a copy of Henry Fuseli's "Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks" (1765). (Though lacking in formal education Blake was, none the less, prodigiously well read.) Through such influences Blake quickly established his ideal human form - those 'Greek profiles', for instance - and remained true to that throughout his life, although so much else developed in his technical ability and interests. Archetypal figures emerged quickly too and likewise repeatedly appear throughout his work. Males, both physical and spiritual, are heavy featured (perhaps owing something to Blake's own physiognomy judging by Thomas Philips's portrait of 1807) and muscular, perhaps following Michelangelo, who like Durer was a great and continuing influence. And indeed Blake was an artist obsessed with the human figure. I can't recall seeing a single image where landscape predominated. Given the deep influence of the Classical it may seem paradoxical that Blake eschewed, as Camille Paglia points out in 'Sexual Personae', classical mythology as a suitable subject for his art, taking his inspiration instead from Biblical and Medieval literature. The one exception seems to be Roman writer Virgil, who appears in the Divine Comedy and whose 'Aeneid' was taken in the Middle Ages to be prophetic of the coming of Christ. In obvious contra-distinction to this strain of classicism was Blake's great devotion, artistically, to the art and architecture of the English Middle Ages, an interest spurred by his repeated visits to Westminster Abbey, where as an apprentice engraver he was sent to study and draw the Medieval tomb sculpture. This interest which is both artistic and in a broad sense political, seems to herald the work and politics of both Pugin and William Morris, both of whom can be read as counter-Enlightenment. His illustrated books, both prophetic and poetic, which he etched and coloured himself, are equivalent to the illuminated manuscript. Perhaps therefore he can seen as some sort of liminal or transition presence in British art history.
     That art forged, ('sublimated' with its occult, alchemical connotations maybe a better expression), from these contrary influences is often hierarchical and very often theatrical, melodramatic even - gestures and expression heightened and exaggerated as though the figures are not merely signifying their own emotional states but the greater spiritual and cosmological ramification of the event depicted. Some of the images I think can be read as 'diagrams of redemption', complex arrangements of figures. To me Blake's radical politics, and his distrust of organised religion (he was a non-conformist) sit uneasy with this tendency towards the hieratic and the Medieval. There is, without a doubt a (creative) tension there, perhaps even a contradiction. After all his desire, surely, was a return to the pre-Modern and he was as equally distrustful of the Enlightenment project - scornful of scientific progress in particular.  Blake then appears a lone voice, an individual adrift stylistically and spiritually in an increasingly materialistic society. As I have already mentioned he saw his role as prophetic - "If the doors of Perception were cleansed, then everything would appear as it is - infinite." And Neo-Platonic. (I really don't want to resort to that well worn trope of the artist, like the prophet without honour in his own country - Blake's art even now is too unsettling, to strange for him ever to be a 'popular' artist.)
     What is far, far easier to trace is his effect of the artists that immediately followed him: Palmer Linnell, Calvert, who formed 'The Ancients', and who with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood could to be seen as counter-Enlightenment, and in the 20th century Nash, Piper and the other Neo-Romantics and also Burra and Cecil Collins and, and surprisingly Edward Bawden - all three of whom are sometimes connected to Neo-Romanticism but who's interests are tangential to the movement, but who with Tolkien and other writers such as Arthur Machen could be said form part of a broader, perhaps spiritualised, certainly artistically 'conservative', British Romantic Tradition. Nor should we forget the influence of his poetry and mysticism on W B Yeats, and on the whole Occult revival of the late 19th century and on that of the 1960s & 70s.  His reach has been very great.