Art: Blake at 200

If painting is deaf poetry, as Simonedes suggested, then poetry is blind painting. William Blake’s art was complete, neither deaf nor blind. One of the great lyric poets in the language, he was almost as outstanding an artist. And his pictures, like his poems, partake of music. Blake’s figures are all dancing in compositions as supple and clear as Mozart. If they do not seem particularly real, it is because Blake saw through the real world into a clearer place. “Imagination is my world,” he said, adding that “he who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments than his perishing and mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all.”

It took the world a long time to see through to William Blake. In his own time he was an obscure figure; for decades after his death, he was considered no more than an interesting eccentric. Now, 200 years after his birth, Poet-Painter Blake is receiving homage at home and abroad.

As If Invisible. Around the turn of the 19th century Blake walked the streets of London as if invisible. The city was the portrait center of the world. Sir Joshua Reynolds was discoursing at the Royal Academy. Two expatriate Americans, Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley, plied an elegant trade. Blake meanwhile engraved and illustrated his own poems, and did illustrations for Milton, Dante and the Bible, working prodigiously to create some of the most magnificent and moving volumes ever made, which he sold, when he could sell them at all, for little more than a dinner.

Until recently, Blake was popularly known as the man who had somehow managed to lodge a handful of poems, such as “Tyger! Tyger! burning bright,” in children’s consciousness. The fact that his Tyger symbolizes, among many other things, the French Revolution, seemed typically odd, as did his hatred of churches and of the Industrial Revolution. But Blake’s angers and oddities gradually cease to annoy as his radiance grows more apparent and his honors increase. Items: ¶The year’s many Blake exhibitions in British museums had their climax in last week’s display at London’s Tate Gallery. Washington’s National Gallery of Art this fall hung a vast Blake exhibition drawn from both England and America. ¶Articles, lectures and broadcasts on Blake are being read and heard in many tongues, including Hindi and Japanese. A color film of his graphic works is in production in England. A memorial bust of Blake, by Sir Jacob Epstein, was placed this year in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey.

¶New books about Blake appear each season. Critically, none has bettered Albert Roe’s profound study of the artist’s illustrations for Dante, published in 1953 (Princeton University; $20). But the new Complete Writings of William Blake (Nonesuch Press-Random House; $12.50) fills a basic need. Most spectacular is a 2-ft.-high volume of Blake’s illustrations for the Bible, sponsored by the Blake Trust and distributed in the U.S. (by Philip Duschnes) at a stiff $95 a copy.

To Show “Truth.” Blake’s time, like the 20th century, was an age of rapid change, revolutions and large-scale wars. Much of his writing, too, has a peculiarly modern urgency. Yet the spirit of Blake’s pictures is far indeed from modern art. He worshiped Raphael, pored over gothic sculpture and illuminations, spent seven years as an apprentice engraver, and recommended endless copying of nature as the only means to transcend it. “The bad artist seems to copy a great deal,” he wrote. “The good one really does.” Instead of the common modern view that painting ought to be an end in itself, he considered art merely a means of showing “truth.” And by “truth” Blake meant his own spiritual insights and occasional visions.

An example of Blake’s insight, and how he could make composition carry it, is the Fogg Museum’s Michael Binding Satan. The Archangel seems at first to be in command, but he himself is bound to the Dragon in a whirling struggle—as spirit is to matter, or day is to night. Recalling the Chinese symbol for Yang and Yin, the picture puts a cosmic interplay in concrete, dramatic terms.

God Creating the Universe records an actual vision that Blake once saw hovering at the top of his staircase. Such experiences were not uncommon with him; his wife once remarked that she saw very little of “Mr. Blake,” for he “is always in paradise.” Blake’s vision of the creation embraces not paradise but chaos. Leaning into the storm from the circle of his own oneness and wholeness, God draws a second circle on the deep. It is a classic conception worthy of Michelangelo.