William Blake: visions but no revelation

WILLIAM BLAKE
Tate Britain
Tickets £18 adults, £5 children
Ends 2 February 2020

The William Blake exhibition running at the moment at Tate Britain was bound to be a crowd winner. Blake seems to have shaped our national consciousness more than any other artist, perhaps excepting Dickens.

It was no wonder that Blake’s Jerusalem was used by Danny Boyle to illustrate Britain’s greatness in the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. Parry’s 1916 setting of the song still stirs, with its combination of social conscience (dark satanic mills), ambitious activism (bring me my sword!) and natural patriotism (green and pleasant hills).

His paintings, though, are perhaps less well known. They don’t lend themselves to reproductions for the sitting-room wall or birthday cards and, like his poems, can be unsettling and ambiguous.

Blake wasn’t popular in most of his own lifetime (1757–1827), and it was only decades after his death, in the wake of the later romantics, that he began to be celebrated.

It’s easy to see why that did come about. The son of a shopkeeper who worked for his living as a designer and engraver, he stands as an example of an artist who displayed both hard graft and natural brilliance. As a visionary who seemed to reject every creed but his own, he is a prime example of being spiritual but not religious. And as a writer who drew attention to exploitation of the weak and vulnerable, the chimney sweep and prostitute, but didn’t establish paternalistic organisations or espouse embarrassing political views, he’s easy to approve.

This exhibition seeks to re-establish Blake as radical and revolutionary, reminding the viewer of Blake’s turbulent setting, including the American War of Independence (1775), the French Revolution (1789) and the wars with France, as well as the precariousness of his own financial situation. It highlights his rejection of the grand forms of popular art and his involvement in circles of free thinkers, publishers and writers as well as his ambitious aims. It offers pages and pages – some faded, fragile and really tiny – from his books, hung on dark walls in low lighting for the sake of preservation. But it doesn’t seek to explain or tie together the extraordinary threads that run through his work.

Again and again Blake draws biblical and other scenes of suffering. There’s Job, Joseph, Naomi, the Genesis narrative, the cross, Dante’s inferno and his own complex myths. Throughout his career he is preoccupied by the coexistence of good and evil, of joy and pain. His rejection of both what he sees as dry law and reductive science are evident, and instead he presents an immanent spiritual vitality. His muscular figures, whether human or angelic, seem to radiate vitality and often purity. One wonders about the influence of his Moravian mother, who must have spoken at home of intense spiritual experience; was that how Blake learned to talk of visions and angels?

But for all Blake’s obsessions he wasn’t an orthodox Christian. Like so many in those post-enlightenment times he forcefully resisted the idea of original sin, but in doing so then couldn’t makes sense of evil.

He saw the church as complicit in oppression and so wrestled on his own, creating mammoth and perplexing mythological poems. There is mystery here, but looking at his work, at his fixation on the relationship of body and soul, the beauty of creation and the necessity of truth-seeking, I couldn’t help but grieve over his failure to grasp the gospel which provides beautiful resolution to, or in places even transcends many of his questions. It was sad to read on the wall at the end of the exhibition his words from his last book, Jerusalem, ‘I must create a system, or be enslav’d by another man’s’. By not engaging with this drive for a meaningful myth or truth through which to understand the world, perhaps our culture no longer verbalises such yearnings or uses the same categories of good and evil, the curators miss out on his relevance to our times. Surely the ongoing appeal and the reason why on a November mid-week afternoon I had to wait in line to see some of these pictures, is because he represents so vividly the concerns and values that dominate all our hearts, even when we don’t put them into words.