The People's Bard - William Blake

Art in America, Sept, 2001 by Carter Ratcliff

William Blake's art, seen in a traveling exhibition that recently visited the Metropolitan Museum, pairs prophetic fervor with a passion for the particular. Making illuminated books that could be easily distributed, Blake saw his audience as all of humanity.

When it traveled from the Tate Britain, in London, to the Metropolitan Museum, in New York, the recent Blake exhibition was reduced to about half of its original size. That left 181 prints, paintings and books--enough to make the spacious roundabout of the Lehman Wing feel crowded, despite Blake's liking for small formats. Even when he applied watercolors or tempera to medium-sized sheets, he had the printmaker's plate in mind, for he wanted his images to be endlessly reproducible and easily distributed. His hoped-for audience was all of humanity, and the chief vehicle of his revolutionary optimism was the bound book. Those who couldn't read his text could get his message from the pictures, though some would have to squint. The pages of Songs of Innocence (1789) are so small--4 7/8 by 2 7/8 inches--that the Met supplied magnifying glasses for their examination.

The earliest work on view was an engraving dated 1773. It shows Joseph of Arimathea, legendary founder of English Christianity, in a pose adapted from Michelangelo's fresco of The Crucifixion of St. Peter (1549). His pensiveness is somehow massive, less the emotion of a person than the mood one might associate with a feature of geography. Because Blake never left England, he must have seen his source secondhand--possibly in a print on the premises of James Basaire, the London engraver who accepted the 15-year-old Blake as an apprentice in 1772. Though he showed a few works at the Royal Academy in the mid-1780s and never quit trying to find an audience for his engraved books, Blake made his living as a printer and illustrator of others' writings. The latest works in this exhibition were ink and watercolor illustrations of Dante's Divine Comedy, which Blake began in 1824 and continued until his death in 1827. These are his calmest figures. Intensity is in the surge of his line and what I'm tempted to call the manic precision of the smallest details.

Usually, we scan an image from a distance and then move in to see how its subtleties fit the larger structures. Especially with Blake's early pictures, this approach doesn't always work. Sometimes the swarm of pictorial incident overwhelms the compositional architecture, as flowering vines might overwhelm a building's facade. With an overload of detail, he brings some of his pictures to the verge of turning into textures. I suppose this tendency reaches its end point in the dripped paintings of Jackson Pollock, which are all texture, no picture. We can, if we like, see the early Blake as a prophet of the allover image. His concern was life in the new Eden, where all would be equal because every self would be fully realized. Blake was a prophet of apocalypse and, if we take his prophecies literally, they failed. Yet the particulars that obsessed him were symbols of the individuality that has flourished ever more vigorously in the past two centuries.

The idea that singularity is a virtue in itself had been simmering since the time of the High Renaissance. With Blake, it boiled over, and his advocacy of the particular could be scalding. Joshua Reynolds, first president of the Royal Academy, declared in his third Discourse (1770) that the true artist "reduce[s] the variety of nature to the abstract idea." "Singular forms" give way to ideal forms, and Neo-Classical propriety prevails. This appeal to "general nature" disgusted Blake. Reading Reynolds's Discourses, he filled its margins with sputters of rage--"A Lie," "A Folly," "Damn the Fool." When Reynolds laid it down as a law that "art must get above ... particularities and details of every kind," Blake replied, "Nonsense. Singular & Particular Detail is the Foundation of the Sublime." And each singularity becomes more sublime, because more singular, each time it is perceived. "Every Eye sees differently," said Blake. "As the Eye--Such the Object."[1] In the course of each individual's perception, all things renew their particularity.

Yet if we want to see how people looked as the 18th century ended, Reynolds is far more helpful than Blake. Reynolds's intimate portrait of Samuel Johnson, completed in 1769, gives us our abiding idea of that formidable personage. When Reynolds cast the actress Sarah Kemble Siddons in the role of "The Tragic Muse," the result was as much a portrait as an allegory. The characters who populate Blake's prophetic books are not people so much as embodiments of the principles that shape the universe he believed he was reshaping with his art. His Milton is less a poet than the spirit of poetic genius. "Albion" is of course England. Less obviously, "Bromion" stands for oppressive morality and "Oothoon" is the figure of wedded love. In the flow of Blake's art, images of the imagination itself ("Orc") and of infinite space ("Enitharmon") become as oddly individual as figures in 18th-century caricature--and sometimes as grotesque, though Blake usually ascends to his own idiosyncratic zone of the sublime. His art is an incitement to ascension. He wants us to sail free of the impediments the material world puts in the way of our spiritual destinies.