After quite the combustible row with my better half this past Sunday I left our house in search of the one calming and comfort indulgence beside a tub of cookie dough ice cream, a crisp, lime garnished cosmopolitan and anything-but-missionary make-up sex that I was certain could soothe my frazzled nerves. A-R-T. With a great huff in my step and even greater puff under my eyes I hopped the metro and dragged my self-pity down to Grand Palais - a turn of the century exhibition space as equally stunning as it is imposing – in anticipation that the hottest ticket in town, The Great World of Andy Warhol, would Calgon me away from my lover's quarrel reality. But alas, when I reared my low-hung head up from the city's bowels I quickly discovered that 4:30 on a sunny spring afternoon in Paris has to be about the worst time for a jilted lover to fix herself on Warhol. A million and two people were snaked behind barricades around the building and considering that the exhibition closed in two hours it was obvious that it was the two and not the million that would get to bypass the velvet rope that day. For a fleeting moment I thought about appealing to the obvious lonely hearts in line - surely I wasn't the only woman here escaping domestic unbliss. Or, maybe I had a better chance of getting in by flashing a little cleavage to one of the undersexed, walkie-talkie toting custodians corralling all this Warholian cattle. Not to mention that they do say flirting is the best revenge. But just as I spied the perfect balding prey and began to tug down the zipper on my blue and white polka-dotted Old Navy sweatshirt of seduction, I had a vision of what it must have been like during the glory days of Warhol's Studio 54 when gaggles of desperate starfuckers waited for hours to hummer down on bouncers just to try and get in for a glimpse of Warhol and his poppered-up Pop Art posse. They usually failed. Thanks, but no thanks I thought as I zipped my dignity back up. After resolving that fate hadn’t crossed mine and Andy’s stars that day, I walked over to another of the current gems showing at Grand Palais, T.A.G., a showcase of over 150 Tag and Graffiti artists. More bloated and barricaded lines that by this time I had ceased brainstorming to surpass. Tired, defeated and harboring about as much self-pity as a stood up bride on her wedding day I turned around to slink quietly off and Ophelia myself in the Seine when divinity intervened. Across the street from Grand Palais lays it’s little sibling, another gorgeous exhibition space, Petit Palais, and within it was just the thing to unmake my brown eyes blue: William Blake: The Visionary Genius of English Romanticism. I knew fate had lured me to the right place when, standing in line to buy my ticket, I looked over to my right and saw William Hurt – yes, that William Hurt – deeply involved in sketching the remarkable first floor ceiling frescoes.
The Accidental Tourist indeed.
As I made my way downstairs to the collection I could not help but think how proud my former thesis advisor Dr. Dorothy Clark would be of me at this moment, on my way to pour over the remnants of William Blake, English Romantic poet, artist, engraver and visionary extraordinaire. I was an English major in college and it was in Dr. Clark’s seminar Literary Responses to Evil (an uplifting semester as you would imagine) that Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell first came into my life. Not that I understood many of his brain twisting axioms at the time - “Rintrah roars and shakes his fires in the burdened air; /Hungry clouds swag on the deep” WTF??? - but it gave me a grittier taste of Blake than I’d experienced in my previous British Romantics courses in which Blake, writing at the close of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, was usually lumped in with the daffodil frolicking and elegiac Wordsworth, the whiny, melancholic and lovesick Keats and the classical myth chasing Italophile Shelley. Not to take anything away from this genius crop of poesy makers but as many critics 
agree William Blake transcends categorization.
Certainly there are Romantic conceits in his poetry but Blake’s vision was far more complex – and ridiculed - than many of his contemporaries. He was shameless and unwavering in voicing his blatant social, political and religious views in his work. Blake was a radical rebel with tremendous causes that lead much of the public and his contemporaries not only to assume him mad but, as is often the curse when the best of minds are born ahead of their time, Blake achieved minimal fame and lots of shame during his days because much of his work was sexually, religiously and politically explicit (truly, a man after my own heart). Blake was a Dissenter from the Church of England, held an audacious belief in racial and sexual equality, supported both the American and French Revolutions, imagined his own mythology, practiced vegetarianism, and reported having visions in which he was visited by God and the archangels. Okay, so this last bit is a little kooky but surely it doesn't render him ripe for a lobotomy.
Despite his eccentric reputation and the lack of recognition that plagued his artistic life, Blake relentlessly communicated his progressive beliefs through poetry and used his unparalleled skills as an artist and engraver to literally “illuminate” his work. Here I must note that the word genius is one that is often misused but in Blake’s case it is synonymous with his name. In 1788 he invented a new method of engraving termed “illuminated printing” and in 1795 he created a mode of painting called “portable fresco.” Forgive my crude attempt at technical explication but the former, inspired by the Medieval illuminated manuscript, was a process whereby Blake wrote or etched the background of a design backward (because a mirror image is produced when printing) onto a copper plate using acid resistant varnish. After the image had dried Blake treated the plate to varnish so that his design remained standing in relief. The copper plate was then inked over, pressed and finally hand-decorated with watercolors. This resulted in beautiful imagistic art but was an expensive and time consuming process that only allowed for a few printed copies of a given text. The latter Blake invention, “portable fresco,” was a method in which he MacGyvered together pigment, animal glue, lead, white chalk, water and Indian ink to create a given design. Again, genius, but a time consuming process that resulted in a limited number of available copies. The fruits of these brilliant inventions and a myriad of other Blakean creations are set against minimalist white-walls, wood frames, glass display cases and adorned with various Blake quotes at this excellent exhibition. Donations from such astute archives as The British Museum, The Fitzwilliam Museum, The University of Glasgow and The Tate Britain give patrons an extraordinarily comprehensive mind’s eye view of the visions of an incomparable master. The exhibition commences with simplicity, in particular early portraits of Edward III, and builds up to a fantastic crescendo of mindblowingly fine work. To be quite honest, I felt like everything on display was a crescendo and that even if my mouth were stitched up my jaw would have forced the stitches out to drop. Precious, original versions of Songs of Innocence and Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell are propped open to select pages and shown along with some of their original copper plates. Stunning oil on wood portraits of great Blake influences Chaucer, Milton, Dante, and Voltaire are on view and complimented by beautiful interpretations of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tale "Pilgrims” and several dreamt-up images of damned souls from Dante’s Inferno. Blake was also a master at depicting darkly prophetic biblical, religious and mythological scenes. He did astonishing illustrations for the Book of Job, a famed interpretation of the 1st century sculpture Laocoon as an English, Hebrew and Greek annotated print with the central figures re-imagined as Jehovah and His Two Sons Satan and Adam and, shown ominously side by side are The Approach of Doom, Joseph Ordering Simeon to Be Bound, Our End is Come and Scene from the Last Judgment (took me right back to Dr. Clark's Evil course all over again). My personal favorite? Several brilliant “illuminated” panels from America: A Prophecy and Europe: A Prophecy, a vivid juxtaposition of images with a graceful yet dynamic and almost comic bookesque energy.
The exhibition culminates quite uniquely in a fitting honor to a man who was without his due during his lifetime. Two portraits of Blake by Jean Cortot are on display as well as a haunting Study of a Head inspired Blake by the austere Francis Bacon. An area is set up so that patrons can sit and watch Jim Jarmusch’s “Dead Man” starring Johnny Depp as a hero named after – who else? - William Blake. And in an interesting audio compliment to the spectacular visuals patrons can listen to two bard-influenced Patti Smith recordings, My Blakean Year and The Augurs of Innocence.
Oh yes - I almost forgot to mention that Blake’s Macbeth-inspired Pity is part of the collection. It stopped me particularly because I noticed it was the first work I’d come across with an elaborate - rather than a simple wood - frame. As I looked at it I reflected on the torrent of low emotion that had carried me here in comparison to how rapt and tranquil I felt now that I was in the midst of this Blakean bounty. I smiled at the tempting white cherub hovering above me as she looked down at woman laying prostrate beneath the nude baby in her grasp before I turned away thinking, Pity - suddenly I haven't energy to bear her anymore.
William Blake: The Visionary Genius of British Romanticism
April 2, 2009 - June 28, 2009
Petit Palais, Musee de Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, Avenue Winston Churchill, 75008
Open everyday from 10 am to 6 pm, closed Monday, late opening Thursday until 8pm
http://blakearchive.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/pressreleaseblake.jpeg
No comments:
Post a Comment