Woke Blake blockbuster doesn’t work
Visitors to the new William Blake exhibition at Tate Britain – a show that we are contractually obliged to refer to as “blockbusting” – are warned beforehand “Please be aware that the art of William Blake contains strong and sometimes challenging imagery, including some depictions of cruelty, suffering, sexual violence and the brutal treatment of enslaved people”. Well, this is all rather more dramatic than, say, a Constable exhibition. Blake occupies an exalted place in English popular imagination, and rightly so. As both a peerlessly talented artist – that overused word “visionary” is for once entirely accurate – and a poet whose writings alternately stir and chill, he has remained a subject of fascination for other writers, artists and musicians ever since his death in 1827. This retrospective, the first major one in three decades, attempts to explore why we are all, in our varying ways, in the shadow of Blake.
In the fascinating and authoritative catalogue, none other than Alan Moore, himself a noted Blakean, writes “in the hallway of 13 Hercules Buildings, Blake beheld both austere deities and trampled devils. It is to the credit of his generous and blazing soul that Heaven was not spared his fierce, critical gaze, nor Hell his sympathy.” This is an excellent summary of Blake, someone whose art reflects an obsession with the duality of the soul and the body, often expressed in beautiful yet disturbing ways. Anyway who has ever seen his memorably monstrous picture “The Ghost Of A Flea” will know how bizarre and baroque his imagination could be; the abiding feeling that anyone who has wallowed in Blake for a while has, in a curious sense, strayed into a parallel world, not that unlike our own, but warped and horrific as well. No wonder Philip Pullman is an avowed admirer of his work.
All of which, unfortunately, makes the Tate’s rather timid approach to this exhibition something of a disappointment. There is something surreal about, on a wet and stormy Tuesday afternoon, looking at some of English art’s most astonishing works, and feeling comparatively unmoved. The problem comes in the curators’ attempt to be both comprehensive and conventional at the same time. It is arranged chronologically, which isn’t a bad idea per se but unfortunately means that there’s at least one not wildly interesting room to get through before you can get onto the really compelling ones. There are a couple of attempts to do something interesting – a recreation of a 19th century gallery where Blake might have exhibited, a mock-up of an altar piece in St James’ Piccadilly Church – but there needed to be a lot more of that and a lot less of a sense of “this is how we do an exhibition in 2019”.
There are other issues as well. There is a depressingly box-ticking adherence to “woke issues” – if you’ve ever wondered about LGBTQ+ issues in Blake’s art, then you’ll be delighted – and it is an unfortunate feature of many of his most extraordinary works that they were conceived and executed on a relatively small scale, meaning that an awful lot are crammed into each of the galleries. By the time that you reach the final exhibit, the extraordinary “The Ancient Of Days”, it is hard not to nod at it with a sense of a job being done, rather than being able to revel in the wonder and beauty of Blake’s art. A more imaginative curator might have attempted to look at the work thematically – “Innocence and Experience”, perhaps. And if the Tate had had real cojones, the thing to have done would have been to have staged it as a pop-up exhibition outside the gallery, in whatever Soho space they could have rented. Or, staying truer to the spirit of Blake, they could have ventured further away, to whatever passes for artisan poverty in contemporary London, and seen if that had a greater effect.
It is easier to criticise the exhibition for what it isn’t than for what it is, and to its credit, it brings together an unparalleled selection of Blake’s work together. As long as you don’t mind being overwhelmed, there are treats and surprises here, including everything from hackwork engravings undertaken to make money to some of his lesser-known pictures; there is a particularly striking and chilling depiction of the blind Milton, eyes glassy and staring. And some of the connections between his writing and art are well made and interesting. It’s not a bad exhibition, just a rather disappointing one.
Blake, though, will endure. I hope that it inspires writers, artists and filmmakers in the way it should, and that this strange, troubled man’s afterlife continues to live on. But, please, can the next retrospective be something altogether more Blakean and less Tatean?