Blake’s vision burns bright… The first major William Blake retrospective in London for 20 years showcases his genius and extraordinary vision
William Blake
Tate Britain, London Until February 2
William Blake was an unlikely kind of genius; the son of a Soho hosier, born in 1757, he had visions of angels in Peckham, lived in poverty for much of his life and fell out with almost everyone who tried to help him.
His written works include the great visionary poems Jerusalem and The Tyger but, as this exhibition over six rooms proves, he was a visual artist of hallucinatory power whose work could look like the apocalypse as scripted by Mary Shelley.
Blake created his own mythological worlds, rich in allegory and allusion, peopled with symbolic forms, birds, phantoms, snakes, giant mythological figures and distressed and despairing souls.
The first major William Blake retrospective in London for 20 years is crammed with prints, drawings and illustrations such as Capaneus The Blasphemer (above) that follow Blake’s life
Works such as the watercolour The Number Of The Beast Is 666 are simultaneously dazzling and disturbing, and Blake’s contemporaries struggled to understand what he was doing.
Wordsworth declared him ‘mad’, but for all the spiritual flights of fancy, Blake was grounded enough.
He seldom stopped working, and in moments of clarity he created stark images that still have arresting power: works such as Newton, where the scientist – as muscular as any figure from a Michelangelo fresco –bends over a parchment plotting angles with a pair of dividers; and the intense self-portrait, drawn in pencil when he was 45, which dares us to defy the artist’s singularity of purpose.
The last piece Blake completed before his death in 1827 was a version of The Ancient Of Days (above) in which a creator figure reaches down from the clouds
The first major Blake retrospective in London for 20 years, this is crammed with prints, drawings and illustrations and follows Blake’s life chronologically, from student work during his time at the Royal Academy, all the way to the last piece he completed before his death in 1827, a version of The Ancient Of Days in which a creator figure reaches down from the clouds.
It was originally designed for the frontispiece of Blake’s 1794 prophetic tract, Europe A Prophecy, and the artist’s concern with our political and spiritual destiny could hardly be more contemporary.
With Jerusalem he wrote a timeless paean to how great England could be.
Today his swirling, shadowy and wholly original pictures retain an incantatory fervour and, as this entire show does, bear down on the viewer until, sighing, you give yourself up to Blake’s extraordinary vision.