“William Blake: Burning Bright“
Yale Center for British Art
1080 Chapel St.
Through Nov. 30. Visit the museum’s website for hours and more information.
The poem is famous, so we think we know it. But really, we only recognize the first stanza: “Tyger Tyger, burning bright, / In the forests of the night; / What immortal hand or eye, / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”
It’s easy to forget how the rest of the poem goes, and the energy it picks up, until it becomes a question about God, for God, maybe even a challenge to God: “When the stars threw down their spears / And water’d heaven with their tears: / Did he smile his work to see? / Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”
As if the words weren’t complex enough, there is the illustration that the artist intended to be entwined with the words. The cat depicted there doesn’t provoke an existential crisis. It seems, if anything, commentary on that crisis. Why should an animal create such fear in people? Is it the cat’s problem, or ours?
The rich complexity and lasting power of William Blake’s art is on full display in William Blake: Burning Bright, an exhibition of his work running now at the Yale Center for British Art.
“The poet, printmaker, and painter William Blake,” as accompanying notes in the exhibition state, “holds a place without parallel in the history of British art and literature. His works were born of visionary encounters with angels and with the spirits of philosophers, poets, and monarchs. From his fertile imagination came a universe of supernatural beings, whose struggles he narrated — and vividly illustrated — in his books of prophecy.”
The piling on of Blake’s adjectives is important. Blake is, of course, primarily known as a poet, and one of the big names in Romantic poetry, along with Byron, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. He’s best-known for his poem “The Tyger,” from which the exhibition gets its subtitle. But even those passingly familiar with Blake are aware that he wrote a lot more than that, and that he wrote in an unfettered, energetic style that presaged a few strains of 20th-century poetry.
Less well known is that Blake illustrated all his poems. In book after book, he understood the words and images as inseparable, working together as parts of a greater artistic whole. In his illuminated books of poetry and prophecy, “Blake’s minute handwriting combines with lyrical illustrations to transform reading into a multisensory experience,” the exhibition’s text states. (Perhaps today he would have been a filmmaker or a graphic novelist.)
Even less well known is that, unlike many of his Romantic poet peers, Blake wasn’t independently wealthy, didn’t have a posh position somewhere. He and his wife Catherine ran a print shop.
Blake was an autodidact in literature, attending school only until he was 10, having learned to read and write. He apprenticed to a printmaker in 1772, when he was 15, and was on his own as a professional by the time he was 21. “After mastering the art of printmaking at an early age, he invented an entirely new form of printing that he called ‘the infernal method.’ This exacting process allowed him to interweave images and printed verses with unprecedented freedom and cohesion,” the show’s accompanying text states.
Blake’s “own youthful aspirations” involved “artistic and spiritual achievement rather than financial success,” the text relates. But he did need to make money somehow, and being a printer was the way he did it. “In the early 1780s, Blake seemed poised for success. He had completed a seven-year engraving apprenticeship and received commissions to engrave illustrations for a variety of authors and publishers. His youthful poems also drew attention, and in 1783, two patrons financed the printing of his juvenile verses, Poetical Sketches.”
In an 18th-century version of an age-old artistic move, Blake kicked back at the demands of commerce. “Instead of promoting” his first book of poems, “Blake stubbornly pursued his own distinctive path, blending his unconventional poetry and images in ways that many contemporaries found difficult to understand. Consequently his most personal and original work remained little known until much later” — after his death — and “his most widely circulated publication was the one he found most frustrating: a set of illustrations for a poem by another author, Robert Blair’s The Grave,” which turned out to be “a great commercial success.”
His own art relied on his infernal method, a form of relief etching that “preserved the painterly movement of Blake’s hand, as direct and expressive as drawing on paper.” The ability to produce his own books “gave Blake full control over his work,” but the painstaking work came at a cost: “produced in small numbers,” his books “reached only a few friends and collectors during his lifetime.”
The books were produced in close collaboration with Catherine. As Blake’s biographer, Alexander Gilchrist, wrote in 1863, “the poet and his wife did everything in making the book — writing, designing, printing, engraving — everything except manufacturing the paper: the very ink, or colour rather, they did make.”
In contemporary terms, the Blakes might be considered artisanal makers, and there was something of a political and spiritual agenda to their methods. According to the North American Victorian Studies Association, they “operated a small print shop — a quiet site of resistance tucked into industrial London.” Blake’s now-canonical Songs of Innocence and of Experience was printed “not as a mass-produced book, but as a hand-illuminated fusion of poetry and image. This act seemed deeply radical; not entirely personal, but political. This publication was founded in a time when industrialism was dehumanizing labor and mass-printing was reducing books to profit.” The studio, according to the Guardian, was a “narrow work space” with two ground-floor rooms, one for painting and one for printing, including a “massive wooden press.” The couple moved into the space in 1790 and “planted a vine and a fig tree, both gifts from the painter George Romney, in the back garden. One visitor recounted finding the couple sitting naked, reading from Paradise Lost — Blake explained that they were merely being Adam and Eve.”
“Blake’s intimate method of creating each copy by hand rejected mechanical replication; his aesthestic touch seemed to say, ‘art should be sacred, not a product,’ ” NAVSA states. He continued to produce other works to keep a roof over his head, illustrations and murals, while he sold fewer than 30 copies of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, a tiny sales trajectory that continued until his death. His final larger-scale work, Jerusalem, “is Blake’s longest original poem and the culmination of his imaginative poetic achievement,” the accompanying notes to the exhibition state. “Composed between 1804 and about 1820, this epic work describes the decline of England due to the overreach of organized religion and the wounds of war.” With the Blakes’s painstaking printing processes, “only six copies were printed during Blake’s lifetime,” and “Blake commented that he had invested so much labor and material into these pages — including the gold highlights that appear throughout — that he would never find a buyer able to pay what it was worth.”
At that time, though, he was also getting paid to create illustrations for editions of the biblical Book of Job, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and Dante’s The Divine Comedy. As the accompanying notes relate, “by the 1820s Blake was receiving crucial financial support from the painter John Lindell,” who commissioned both the Job and Dante projects.
By leaning harder into Blake’s printmaking work than most presentations of Blake do, the YCBA show allows a fuller glimpse into his multifaceted talent, and paints a fuller picture of a person who is usually depicted as — and in fairness, as many of his contemporaries thought he was — pretty crazy. Blake was highly eccentric and insistent on his art, and frequently claimed visitations by visions and angels. “When the sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea? O no, no, I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty,” he wrote once. But he was also a skilled and innovative technician, devoted to the craft of printmaking, and not an entire failure as a printmaker.
In the end, though, the YCBA show is a gift for Blake fans if only for the chance to see his works in person; the museum, it turns out, has a lot of stunning examples of his work, including a couple of those original copies the Blakes made. Regardless of the scaffolding around it, Blake’s art speaks for itself.
And what does it say to us now? Blake was a revolution-minded person living in a revolutionary time. He was a staunch abolitionist and very pro-feminist. Frankly sexual, he believed in melting down the shackles of marriage to practice freer forms of love. His work, deeply Christian, is also in almost every way deeply heretical. It’s easy to understand how his potent, ecstatic work threaded the needle in surviving his death and ultimately rising from obscurity to inform generations after him, from the modernists to the Beats to pretty much anyone who thinks of themselves as, well, kind of a freak. His work is an explosion of psychedelia and he didn’t even need drugs to get there.
As far as resonating today, the proof is on the pages. Take 1793’s America: A Prophecy, which “uses the story of the American Revolution to explore the fight between freedom and oppression,” as the accompanying notes describe it. In it, Blake deploys a set of allegorical characters, including “Orc, who stands for the passionate urge for revolution, and Urizen, who represents calm, reflective reason.” The conflict continues in subsequent books, “touching on gender, sex, religion, and the joys and miseries of the natural world.”
A page displayed in the exhibition hits maybe a little too close to home, harder than most political commentary, or analysts trying to explain it all. Maybe sometimes words and images get closer to right when they stop trying to make so much sense.
Fury! rage! madness! in a wind swept through America
And the red flames of Orc that folded roaring fierce around
The angry shores, and the fierce rushing of th' inhabitants together:
The citizens of New-York close their books & lock their chests:
The mariners of Boston drop their anchors and unlade:
The scribe of Pensylvania casts his pen upon the earth:
The builder of Virginia throws his hammer down in fear.
Then had America been lost, o'erwhelm'd by the Atlantic,
And Earth had lost another portion of the infinite,
But all rush together in the night in wrath and raging fire
The red fires rag'd!
