Artist as Oracle
The Morgan’s exhibition of the work of William Blake reminds us of the artist’s many gifts
The term “visionary” is bandied about so loosely these days that you might not know what to do when one actually shows up. Perhaps it was always that way. Saints and prophets and oracles disrupt the status quo. They punch holes in our reality; remove the floor from beneath our feet; open windows in the sky. They bring gods and demons into our midst, which is another way to say that they bring us closer to ourselves and set our lives on fire. But despite everything we tell ourselves to the contrary, who is ever really ready for that? What do you do then with a visionary, especially one whose visions are coming at you with a vengeance? You may recognize the truth of his wares, but you shut the door in his face and you dismiss him as mad.
This seems to have been the reception awarded the British poet, painter and printmaker William Blake (1757-1827), who is again at our door full-force, in William Blake’s World: “A New Heaven Is Begun,” a compact yet stellar exhibition of more than 100 works at the Morgan Library & Museum.
Blake claimed to have seen the face of God in a window, as well as angels in a tree, the prophet Ezekiel in a field and his dead brother, Robert, whose joyful soul visited him in a dream and rose through the ceiling. It was during a conversation with his dead brother Robert in 1787, that William discovered how to invent a form of illuminated relief etching that would allow the artist to print his illustrated poems without the use of typography. This got rid of the middlemen (the then-traditional printers, illustrators and typographers who had dominated the field of printmaking for more than 300 years), and led to Blake’s masterpieces such as “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” “Songs of Innocence and of Experience,” “Visions of the Daughters of Albion,” “America,” “The Book of Job” and the illustrations of Dante.
This innovation allowed Blake to be the sole conduit between his works and his muse. In Blake’s rapturous hands, this invention produced weird, ecstatic books that married word and image, poetry and painting. Blake’s illuminated printed books harked back to Medieval manuscripts. They set the stage in the West for the acceptance of Japanese prints, and they were harbingers of the swirling forms of the Arts & Crafts Movement and Art Nouveau; the expressive mysticism of Romanticism, Symbolism and Expressionism; as well as the flat, woven space of abstraction.
Blake is a perfect subject for the Morgan, which houses drawings, prints, illuminated books, letters and autograph manuscripts, the collective fruit of Blake’s labor. And the Morgan’s exhibit, organized by former director Charles Ryskamp and curators Anna Lou Ashby and Cara Denison, is a well-rounded, well-paced gem of a show that reminds us of the artist’s far-reaching gifts. Culled entirely from the Morgan’s holdings, it touches upon all aspects of the artist without feeling heavy-handed or piecemeal.
At the heart of the exhibition is a series of 21 watercolors for “The Book of Job” (1805-10; 1821) and 12 designs illustrating Milton’s “L’ Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.” The illustrations for “The Book of Job” exude an admonishing air toward Job’s long-suffering piety, his lack of individualism and his literal take on God’s word. But Blake is never irreverent. The watercolors are silvery, milky and lithe—almost moonlit—with a classical stateliness. Their bodies feel carved out of liquid ivory. Sporting big hands and feet, the figures are as monumental as Egyptian statuary, yet they move like flame and cloud. As with most of Blake’s works, the illustrations are theatrical, blunt and beautiful, as direct as children’s drawings. Blake treats the rectangle as a proscenium stage; the characters as actors who face the viewer and make clear their actions and intentions. Blake was inspired by prints made after Michelangelo and Raphael, and although he stirs together Mannerism and Classicism into a churning tumult, he manages never to loose the truth and directness, the purpose and center, of his narrative.
Blake can be erotic, lyrical and dark; Romantic and Neoclassical, but I was unaware until this show of his ability to be French. Also included at the Morgan, along with poetry in the artist’s hand and molten, hand-colored images that resemble monoprints—as well as worthwhile works by Blake’s contemporaries John Linnell, Edward Calvert, Samuel Palmer and Henry Fuseli—are two early prints after Watteau, surprising works that retain the Frenchman’s lightness.
It has been said of Blake, and rightly so, that he is much greater than the sum of his works; and that any attempt to isolate aspects of his art or thought is futile. Blake was a bundle of contradictions, misfires and overzealousness, all of which he believed make us human. Sometimes it is as if he is stirring a cauldron and howling at the moon. Blake did not take himself or his visions lightly (the show’s subtitle “A New Heaven Is Begun” is a quote from Blake referring to the significance of his date of birth). Both a devout Christian and a resolute individualist, Blake fought against dogma and oppression, religious or otherwise. He believed that each man had to find his own way; and what better path toward self-awareness than that of the artist. For Blake, imagination and reason, sexual passion and religious fervor, intellectual curiosity and spiritual unrest—the visual and the verbal—all fueled the same fire.
Still, Blake’s work suffers seemingly from being innovative on too many fronts. Each of his extraordinary gifts appears not to have outshone but, rather, to have competitively eclipsed all the others. Like equally ascendant forces racing up separate faces of a pyramid, Blake’s respective accomplishments seem to have collided at the pinnacle—scattering the artist into so many rays of light.
And a peculiar muddling continues to occur. It’s as if Blake’s fire was too much to bear and, therefore, had to be doled out among numerous furnaces: Poets appreciate Blake for his poetry; historians see him for his Romantic, though uniquely enlightened, anti-Enlightenment attitudes; painters and illustrators appreciate his gifts as a storyteller, colorist and draftsman; and printmakers understand his advancement of the medium. As recently as the 1960s Blake was embraced for his views on feminism, racial and sexual equality and free love.
Ironically, Blake’s great gift as a Modern artist and poet was his ability to unify—not only image and word but art and man—god and man. He flirted back and forth between reality and myth. He was able to give back to ornamentation and to the searching line—as in Asian art—a front-and-center purposefulness and sense of discovery. In life as well as art he brought traditional marginalia inward and allowed the main event to seep into the margins. He treated line and geometry—whether letterform or limb—as living forces: text and image read interchangeably as intestine, root, figure, fish, air, stream, wing and vine. Blake did not just tell stories he gave movement and life to the page.
More important, he gave back to the artist the ancient role of oracle. His works illustrated a world somewhere between heaven and earth—a world that audiences then, and perhaps even now, was not quite ready for. Ready or not, at the Morgan Blake’s fire is rekindled and his visions are brought into full light.
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William Blake’s World: “A New Heaven Is Begun” through Jan. 3, The Morgan Library & Museum; 225 Madison Ave. (betw. 36th & 37th Sts.), 212-685-0008.
