Transcendent Blake seduces BAC

By Chris Schmidt

"Everyone knew they were a part of `History' except the deceased / who never knew exactly what was happening even when I was alive."

The words are Allen Ginsberg's, but they couldn't have been written without some help from William Blake. The suggestion might give the academy indigestion, but the comparison isn't much of a stretch: both poets were political rebels, spiritual iconoclasts, and sexual revolutionaries to boot. But unlike Ginsberg, who died with panegyrics heaped on his grave like gladioli, Blake languished in obscurity for much of his lifetime and for several generations afterward. Still, Blake hardly had a low estimation of his work; he once called his poem "Vala," "the Grandest Poem that this World Contains." In a life left wanting of earthly recognition, Blake's pride in his work was the driving force that public acclaim might otherwise have provided--a force that Blake hoped might eventually propel him heavenward. "I may praise it ," he explained, "since I dare not pretend to be any other than the Secretary; the Authors are in Eternity."

Catherine Blake once remarked of her husband, "I have very little of Blake's company; he is always in Paradise." If Blake's head was always a little in the clouds, then his work was what kept him grounded. Not because it was more orthodox, but because it was so taxing. Blake began his career as an apprentice to an engraver, and the art that developed out of that apprenticeship always stayed true to its beginnings. His illuminated books--Blake's great contribution to Western culture--are transcendent syntheses of art and text, all the more amazing for having been etched (including the meticulous handscript print) backwards.

"The Human Form Divine," the British Art Center's new exhibit of Blake prints and paintings, is a must-see. Not only does it display prints from the illuminated books that, because of their delicacy, can rarely be seen, but it also goes some distance to explain how Blake's art came about, in terms of both process and context. The exhibit is structured chronologically, starting with his early etchings, then proceeds to The Songs of Innocence and Experience, the first major work where Blake puts the "illuminated printing" technique to use. Because no copper plates of Blake's survive, the BAC commissioned a replica to show how the acid-wash etching process worked--just one example of the many touches Curator of Rare Prints and Books Patrick Noon and his staff have provided to guide the viewer through the exhibit.

Although Blake had a tempestuous relationship with a small but revolving band of patrons--no sooner would one send a Wedgewood commission his way then he would renounce him as distracting him from his true art--he didn't completely shun professional illustrations. Lucky for us. The illustrations of Thomas Gray's poems that John Flaxman commissioned from Blake as a present to Mrs. Flaxman are nothing less than gorgeous. On each page, a small rectangle sits in the middle, surrounded by the illustration like a waterlily in a reflecting pool. Up close, you can see where Mrs. Flaxman had x'd in pencil the line she wanted illustrated--a literal-minded touch that may have inspired Blake's archly literal renderings of the lines. Gray's "vultures of the mind" become, in Blake's hand, green and scaly ogres; in another illustration, Gray's lovers fly out of windows like seraphs, their robes curling behind them.

But the jewel in the exhibit's crown is Blake's last and greatest work, Jerusalem. Of the five copies of Jerusalem that Blake printed, only one was in color, and the BAC has it. Blake composed the work when his career as an engraver had dried up; he was asking a year's wages for the book, and it was unlikely that he never expected to sell it. He didn't, of course, but the attention he lavished on the work is inspiring. Moons shine with extravagant gold leaf. Pages of orange text practically glow above washes of blue and yellow watercolor. Blake's mythological figures--those not fettered in sexually suggestive poses like Los, who rests a hammer on an anvil like a one-eyed monster--leap off the leaves, their bared muscles gleaming like exoskeletons.

"The Human Form Divine" has many virtues; for anyone who suspects he may ever read Blake, the exhibit is a necessary introduction to a poet who is difficult, regardless of biographers' protestations to the contrary. But as the BAC's rubric suggests, it's also a prime opportunity to study the human form in all its glory, as it were. Blake, for all his fusty and arcane religious ideas, was not a prude. One famous anecdote has a visitor finding the Blakes reciting Paradise Lost stark naked. With all our millenarian tremors--the death of Ginsberg, our great seer of sexual expression, days after a cult of castrati pledge allegiance to a comet--Blake comes to us like a tonic: one taken for the head, the heart, and between the legs.

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