“A wild pet for the overcultured,” as the poet TS Eliot called it, is only half the story of William Blake (1757-1827), a poet most famous for his influence on certain moderns (Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith) than for being read.
Blake combined extremes: rambling invocations about European history alongside ditties about the soul that any child could enjoy. As he wrote in 1794: “I was angry with my friend; / I told my anger, my anger is over…”
He also made drawings and paintings, and some nice ones appeared among the 112 works in “William Blake: Visionary” recently on view at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. But the works that stood out in this concise and captivating retrospective were his prints, which were Blake's main livelihood.
In an age of pamphlets and upward mobility, Blake's “illuminated books,” as he called them, stood out like a relic of Gutenberg. His best-known collection, “Songs of Innocence and Experience” (1789-94), of which there were six pages on view, occupies a printing block not much larger than a credit card. In “El Tigre,” his short hymn about the creation of the “Songs,” every detail denotes the wonder of a child narrator and the clipped meter of a lullaby: the wavy tails of his and, the tendrils of green vines that They frame his tiny stanzas and the sighting of his beast drawn at the bottom of the page.
His drawings feel both of their time—with neoclassical musculature—but also self-contained and a little ossified, as seen in the faces of “Laocoön” (1815-27), his engraving of the Hellenistic Greek statue surrounded by graffiti-like inscriptions of Greek and Christian mythology.
Blake sought approval from the Royal Academy, London's artistic guardian, but never gained it.
Instead, he became an apprentice engraver—a title he could never shake—and made a living illustrating the books of others. By age 33, reflected by his skillful engraving of William Hogarth's “Beggar's Opera” (1790), he knew how shading could convey depth and shadow—and he showed deference to Hogarth, the society satirist whose works hung in clubs. most exclusive in London.
But Hogarth had been dead for 25 years. There were revolutions afoot: monarchies collapsing in the United States and France, William Wilberforce's crusade against the slave trade, and deism unleashed. Blake found traveling companions—the radical feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, the Swiss Gothic painter Henry Fuseli—and cut plaques for them.
Back then, text was printed with small pieces of metal that stamped ink onto the positive page. Conversely, illustrations such as Blake's Hogarth were transferred to negative paper and had to be printed on sheets separate from the text. Due to conflicting processes, the text and images had to alternate pages.
But Blake found a new and empowering way for his books. He drew words and images directly on his plates with wax. He then used acid to remove all negative space, revealing a unified positive matrix, like a metal seal. He inked prints in different colors and then added pigments and inks to the page with a brush.
This new process took time, but it allowed for authorship.
In “America, a Prophecy” (1793), his 17-panel paean to the revolution of 1776, we follow Orco (rebellion and creation, personified) as he fights against Albion (the England of George III) and Urizen (the Blake's deity of cold and unfeeling logic). The naked Orc appears around stanzas, printed in blue, that tell how “the British soldiers of the thirteen States uttered a howl / of anguish, threw their swords and muskets to the earth and fled.”
These pages seem both scribal and invoked, like Polaroid photographs of the Enlightenment unconscious.
By: Walker Mimms
THE NEW YORK TIMES
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/7062329, IMPORTING DATE: 2024-01-09 20:45:07
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