The Gentle Seer of Felpham

By ROBERT HUGHES

London 's Blake retrospective

Of late, three magnificent exhibitions in London have sharply revised our ideas on the stature of English art in the 18th and early 19th centuries. The first, in 1974, was the Turner retrospective at the Royal Academy; the second was Constable at the Tate Gallery. Now it is William Blake's turn. Through May, some 340 of his works are on view at the Tate, in a comprehensive show organized by Art Historian Martin Butlin: paintings, drawings, watercolors, woodcuts, color prints, illustrated books.

Blake's reputation has grown steadily over the past 50 years. He is no longer pictured as a dotty but harmless visionary, chatting with the prophet Ezekiel at dinner; nor is his art treated, as it once was, as an appendage to his poetry. He is more apt to be seen as one of the key figures in the history of English radicalism, rendering the upheavals of his time in a framework of cosmic mythology: the friend of Tom Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft, the burning allegorist of revolution in France and America, the poet of liberty. But no exhibition in living memory has offered quite so much access to him as this one. We see the artist, warts and all: the epiphanies but the fustian too. It is an invigorating show and, obviously, a taxing one as well. Blake never strove to please, and much of his output was propelled by a need whose expression was, to put it mildly, obscure.

"Felpham," he wrote in 1800 to his sculptor friend John Flaxman from his new home in the countryside, "is a sweet place for Study, because it is more Spiritual than London. Heaven opens here on all sides her golden Gates: her windows are not obstructed by vapours: voices of Celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard, & their forms more distinctly seen . . . Now Begins a New life, because another covering of Earth is shaken off. I am more famed in Heaven for my works than I could well conceive." Outside the madhouse or the monastery, no Englishman alive then--and no European of comparable genius--considered his life in quite this way. Blake, who never thought he was a dreamer, meant everything he painted to have the instructive force of revelation. Each drawing and poem--whether small and limpid, like the Songs of Innocence or his woodcut illustrations to Thornton's Virgil, or epically obscure, like the cantos of The Four Zoas or the grand designs of Jerusalem--was imagined as part of a metaphysical system, a means of explaining the history and nature of the world in terms of the fall and redemption of man.

Because he conceived his mission as didactic, Blake's ruling passion was exactness. Nothing infuriated him more than the idea that visions might be cloudy or woolly. "I know too well that a great majority of Englishmen are fond of The Indefinite which they Measure by New ton's Doctrine of the Fluxions of an Atom, A Thing that does not Exist ... a Line or Lineament is not formed by Chance; a Line is a Line in its Minutest Subdivisions . . . God keep me from the Divinity of Yes & No too, The Yea Nay Creeping Jesus, from supposing Up & Down to be the same Thing as all Experimentalists must suppose." This is a long way from the world of relativity and particle physics.

Truth was in line, not in color or tone. Some of Blake's most acrid denunciations were reserved for Rembrandt and Rubens, in whose "dark caverns" and "hellish brownness" the true lessons of Raphael and Michelangelo were, in his opinion, lost. His own images were overwhelmingly linear, his style based on outline and infill. The line recalls its 16th century sources in mannerist engravings (Blake never crossed the channel, and so had to depend on prints for his contact with Michelangelo). His famous Glad Day, showing Albion, the spirit of resurgent England, in mid-dance with his arms flung ecstatically wide, was based on a mediocre diagram of Vitruvian man in an old treatise on proportion; it transcends its source as Macbeth transcends Holinshed.

There are moments in Blake's large output when the linearity of his nudes becomes nearly absurd -- they resemble skinned rabbits, thongs of formalized pink tendon. But against these, one must reckon such masterpieces of the imagined figure as Elohim Creating Adam, 1795, with the repressive God of the Old Testament, terrible in the weight of his beard and vast wings, waking the serpent-bound Adam to a life of toil and subjection. And his sense of dramatic terribilit`a, in the midst of the grotesque, was unparalleled. Few demonic images in Western art radiate such a nightmarish charge of sexual energy as The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun, 1803-05. Based on Revelation 12: 1-4, it stands at the extreme opposite end of the scale of feeling from Blake's lyric inventions, the visions of Eden, of childhood and angelic morning stars. It was as a biblical illustrator that Blake achieved his greatness as an artist. His color prints of 1795, along with his illustrations of Milton and biblical water-colors of 1800-09, contain some of the most sublime and tragic images of the body ever to be put on small sheets of paper. Never again would the nude be made to carry such a wealth of meaning as it does in Blake.

--Robert Hughes

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