There has been an embarrassment of riches in recent years with regards to William Blake exhibitions. In 2019, Tate Britain held a major retrospective of the artist's work, William Blake Artist, and while the pandemic interrupted the Getty Museum's William Blake: Visionary, that finally opened in October last year. These two significant events have now been joined by a third, William Blake's Universe, which runs from 23 February until 19 May at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. We've already included a podcast review of the exhibition itself, which you can see at the bottom of this page, and here we'll concentrate on the handsome catalogue that accompanies the exhibition.
European Blake
While it would be possible to interpret Blake's universe in a variety of ways, both exhibition and catalogue are as much concerned with the world in which Blake lived at the turn of the nineteenth century as much as his cosmology. The catalogue is a collection of essays by a series of eminent Blake scholars and art historians, with the main editors Helen Chadwick and David Bindman contextualising what follows within a movement of European visionary art during the Revolutionary period.
Subsequent sections are divided (as is the exhibition itself) between Blake's interests in the past, characterised as "Antiquity and the Gothic", the present in which he lived, "Europe in Flames", and a future vision, "Spiritual Renewal". Each of these sections are divided into individual essays by various contributors, including those by Sarah Haggarty, Cecilia Muratori, James Vigus and Joseph Leo Koerner. Such an approach is itself unusual: the Tate's William Blake is [primarily written by Martin Myrone], while William Blake Visionary includes three essays contextualising Blake in terms of his life, times, and as a person of interest to American collectors. By including more variety in terms of contributors, William Blake's Universe feels a little like a crossover between an edited art history collection and an exhibition catalogue. With such variety, it must be said that this brings both a bonus in terms of multiple perspectives on Blake, but also a slight negative in that it lacks some of the cohesion that a true catalogue would bring. The Fitzwilliam Blake collection is one of the best in the UK, and a pedantic part of me would like to see an update to David Bindman's 1970 catalogue.
The argument that Blake operated within a specifically European tradition of visionary art is made in Helen Chadwick's opening chapter, and the comparison to Runge dominates here as it does in the exhibition itself. That this is not a common connection is recognised by Chadwick herself, who remarks that their work has "rarely been shown in the same space, perhaps as a result of their lack of a personal connection and the significant difference of their circumstances" (p.11). Critics who have made this connection previously are Robert Rosenblum, who casts a faint shadow over both catalogue and exhibition, and William Vaughan, who contributes the final succinct and lucid essay on "Romantic nationalism in Germany and Britain" in this volume.
Antiquity and the Gothic
For the most part, neither exhibition or catalogue entirely convince me that Blake really is a European artist, at least in the sense that they seem to consider. This is not that "English Blake" turns his back on European traditions - an artist who is so indebted to Michelangelo among others would never do that - but that he does reject the vogue for oil painting and a softening of lines which followed in the wake of the Venetian painters and figures such as Rubens who he associated strongly with Sir Joshua Reynolds and his like.
Where the connection is stronger is in the abiding interest among so many artists in the revival of classical traditions. As multiple Blake scholars have indicated, Blake's craft and practice blossomed during a period of the neoclassical revival, and even if he did overtly reject classicism later in his career, visually at least he was always influenced by the styles that stalked European art following the Renaissance. The catalogue is, in my opinion, much stronger on Blake as an artist influenced by antiquity rather than the Gothic, primarily because it focuses on examples of copies made of classical works by a variety of artists, and because it spends more time on figures such as John Flaxman than Henry Fuseli. The section as a whole draws attention to some of the early practices of Blake's art and training, but it is significant that this is the section of William Blake's Universe where the catalogue is doing most of the heavy lifting, rather than in contributory essays.
Revolution and Spiritual Renewal
"Europe in Flames" begins with a clear if - these days - fairly conventional interpretation by David Bindman of Blake's art as exemplars of apocalypse and revolution. Rereading William Blake's Universe, I'm pretty sure that my sense of being underwhelmed at this point with the book (as opposed to the exhibition) is because it defers for a few pages one of the real highlights of the show: the plates from Blake's continental prophecies, America and Europe, which explode into the viewer's vision on red walls in the Fitzwilliam galleries. The copies owned by the Fitzwilliam are excellent examples, vivid and dramatic, and it is a real pleasure to see them captured in the book for those who will not be able to witness them in situ.
It is with the third part of both book and exhibition, however, that William Blake's Universe takes flight, with a variety of contributions in terms of essays, as well as the bulk of European art on loan from various other institutions. The catalogue provides excellent reproductions of Blake's illustrations to John Milton's Paradise Regained, one of the treasures of the Fitzwilliam collection, as well as serviceable renditions of the illustrations to Job. A real delight, however, because it was so unexpected, was the room containing copies of works by Jacob Böhme, the German philosopher and mystic whose books, alongside those of other artists and writers such as Dionysius Freher, push the very limits of what the form can do and immediately dazzle the viewer as a model for what Blake was attempting to achieve with his own illuminated books.
In contrast to this section, I find myself intrigued by the Otto Runge works - yet strangely unconvinced. Runge's work itself is beautiful and strives for a particular otherworldliness that would appear to superficially occupy the same magisterum as Blake, yet again and again the visual language that Runge appeals to strikes me as post- rather than pre-Raphael, with putti and Botticelli-esque nudes that operate in an allegorical universe that is removed from Blakes. There is also a sense that this final part of both book and exhibition strive to shoehorn in a great deal of material which individually - as in James Vigus's essay on Blake and Henry Crabb Robinson, or William Vaughan's piece on English and German Romantic nationalism - is excellent, yet which fails as a whole to convince me that Blake is influenced by German Romanticism in the same way as, for example, Coleridge.
Too great for the eye of man
My observations here are born out of a sense of slightly bemusement. The exhibition at the Fitzwilliam is a truly superb one, not least - to repeat - because it displays one of the finest collections of Blake in the UK. Blake's contemporaries on show are also transcendent: Runge's Times of Day was a revelation to me and any work by Caspar David Friedrich, one of the giants of European Romantic art, is always worth seeing. While some critics have argued that it is those European artists who demonstrate the real genius of art, there sense of dissatisfaction strikes me as a subconscious recognition that Blake is doing something very different. Each artist is a portion of eternity too great for the eye of man, and what we see in often very different work, whether by Blake, Runge, Friedrich or Flaxman, is a multiplicity of approaches to artistic vision during the Romantic period.