making a European out of the poet and artist who never left England Achi-News

The Universe of William Blake, the new (free) exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, is a celebration of the work of the Romantic artist, writer and visionary.

Famous now but little known in his lifetime, Blake (1757-1827) has recently received star billing from Tate Britain. But at the Fitzwilliam, he is forced to share the spotlight with fellow British and German artists, in particular Philipp Otto Runge (1777-1810), whose illumination The Small Morning hangs in the last room the exhibition.

The approach of exhibition curators David Bindman and Esther Chadwick is quietly provocative. Blake is also known as a poet, he never left Britain, and he never met Runge. He was also a contrarian, with broadly anti-establishment views. So what is at stake in reframing Blake as a European artist, and does the exhibition convince?

Blake’s universe

The title of the exhibition and the life-size cast of Blake’s head that greets you as you enter, suggest that his aim will be to present a journey inside his mind. And to an extent, it does. The bulk of the work on display is by Blake himself, much of it drawn from the Fitzwilliam Museum’s own magnificent collection.

Particular highlights include Blake’s dazzling Albion Rose and mysterious Ancient of Days, his beautifully colored American and European poems, and his vigorous reinterpretations of ancient Greek sculptures such as the Laocoön.

Also on display are impressive works by other artists, including Death on the Pale Horse by Benjamin West and Caspar David Friedrich’s series of seven sepia sketches, Ages of Man (Die Lebensalter).

Obviously this “universe” does not belong to Blake alone. It is a shared imaginative and cultural space, inhabited by Blake and other Romantic artists across Europe from the 1770s to the 1820s.

Portraits of the main players appear in the anteroom of the exhibition. First Runge, whose soulful self-portrait is twinned with Blake’s life mask at the entrance. Then John Flaxman, James Barry, and Henry Fuseli, who knew Blake personally, and Asmus Jacob Carstens and Caspar David Friedrich, who he did not.

Blake the artist?

It is revealing to see Blake in the company of artists like these. Poems such as The Tyger, London and the verse And did those feet (better known as the Jerusalem hymn, after it was set to music by Hubert Parry in 1916), marked Blake out as a poet.

In fact it was this and more. The William Blake Archive online suggests the range of his work rendered in text, engraving, printmaking, drawing and painting.

Blake rarely wrote a poem without an illustration. Working with his wife Catherine, he hand-engraved, colored and hand-printed “illuminated books” of his verses, releasing dozens of copies over his lifetime essentially as small editions of the press.

However, he made his living creating and selling visual art – engravings and book illustrations – to commercial publishers. He also produced single and serial works of art for private patrons.

Blake longed to be better known as an artist (and a writer too), and to share his work with a larger audience. But his career declined, hampered by the fragile nature of the art market during the Napoleonic wars, the low social status of his commercial engraving, and his conflicting views.

The exhibition

The exhibition’s bold design ensures that there is a strong central narrative. Each room focuses on the engagement of European artists with the past, present and future.

Classical antiquity and the old masters are the past, whose works were copied and repurposed by artists across Europe as they honed their skills in academy schools. The present is war and revolution, in America, France and Haiti. The future is spiritual renewal, variously framed in mystical, Christian, pantheistic and nationalist terms.

Within this historical narrative are clustered smaller scenes that reward attentive viewing. Sketches after Michelangelo, visits to a leper hospital, and Jakob Böhme’s mystical Christian philosophy are among the themes identified and shown to be common concerns among what may at first appear to be a disparate group of artists.

The architecture of the exhibition invites active engagement as well. Separate pages from Blake’s illuminated book, Europe, are displayed on a corrugated screen zigzagging across the central room, fired like a bolt of lightning – a phenomenon associated with political revolution.

Early in the exhibition, a window is cut from the “past” to the “future”, complicating the historical narrative. Is it true that we are always moving forward, that things are always getting better?

Blake the European?

Blake never had the money to travel to mainland Europe, nor was he sponsored by one of his patrons to go to Rome. He never read German either, although he learned Italian later in life, and illustrated Dante.

He was not, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, influenced by German idealist philosophy. But being educated at the Royal Academy, like Blake between 1779 and 1785, meant learning from European models. And having a Moravian mother (a type of Protestant) may have included learning German songs and hymns during childhood.

The Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, the mystics Böhme and Emanuel Swedenborg were all favorites of Blake’s, and were widely read across the European continent. Add to this the reverberations of revolution, war, trade, imperialism – all of which resonate in Blake’s art and poetry – and it is clear that Blake was not isolated in her outlook.

The question of Blake’s Europeanness is asked everywhere in this exhibition, but never overtly. The working title “Blake in Europe”, was lost along the way. Further questions are never asked about the limits of the shared European Romantic culture that the exhibition promotes. What culture, or cultures, you might ask, and to whom?

As Sibylle Erle, Chairman of the Blake Society, said: “For us, Blake is for everyone.” Visit the William Blake Universe if you can, and see what you think.