‘William Blake’s Universe’
Having spent the Vigour of my Youth & Genius under the Opression of Sr Joshua & his Gang of Cunning Hired Knaves Without Employment & as much as could possibly be Without Bread, The Reader must Expect to Read in all my Remarks on these Books Nothing but Indignation & Resentment While Sr Joshua was rolling in Riches Barry was Poor & [independent] Mortimer was [despised & Mocked][I now despise & Mock in turn although Suffring Neglect]
William Blake ‘Annotations to the teaching of Joshua Reynolds’
At the back of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, on the top floor in the gallery set aside for Spanish (+ Flemish) arts lies the petite contemporary sculpture of a man in severe distress (posited as a middle eastern refugee), placed in juxtaposition (the title of this curated couple) with a sculpture of San Sebastián in shiny fulsome wood. The voice of the museum offers these as erotic subjects – something San Sebastian will be accustomed to – but in this place, where the vulnerable – displaced, tortured and chased across continents – and now housed under bricks and stone bought with atrocities – disrespecting the vulnerable, placing a man with no defenses, ostensibly representative of people threatened and torn apart and starved by the global politics of colonialism and disaster capitalism and exploitation and racism.
The Fitzwilliam is a strange museum built on money made from investing in the transatlantic slave trade. Blood money the museum itself; and Cambridge university as its umbrella, is struggling to reconcile with the image of upbeat equality & diversity it is struggling to project. The investment in the buying, selling and transportation of African slaves produced huge wealth for Fitzwilliam, his friends and a massively complex web of connections around the museum. Built to promote its founders class and culture through grandiose architecture with Greek & Roman references, it exists as a heavy handed tribute to empire. Remnants of ancient empires line the walls of its giddily imposing founders entrance. About the accumulated relics of dead cultures the collection and the building have expanded; and now it links a shaky bunch of collections; which sit uneasily together with shoddy and occasionally misleading (actually wrong in some painful cases) labels.
‘William Blake’s Universe‘. has much to recommend it. Rows of pages from Blake’s books available for the viewer to take their time and peruse, unobstructed by over curation or constant brash signposting. In fact it goes a little too far, and largely I think fails newcomers to Blake - with little explanation where explanation might be necessary. There’s some useful contemporaries to him, such as Flaxman (bit too much Flaxman for my liking), Barry, Palmer, Linnel, Romney and (Casper) David. Personally I enjoyed its lack of insistent curation, and that it refuses to speak down to its audience. Though I see some greater effort could’ve been made to draw people in. Blake’s philosophies are referred to vaguely as are his politics. No real effort is made to explain who, what or why Christian non-conformists are / were…. (But you’ll find some writings from the British revolution here; and read Christopher Hill’s wonderful ‘World Turned Upside Down’. there’s some great precursors / influences in the antinomian traditions he inherited with the non conformists) There was a little info on Jakob Böhme - a mystic German influential on the ‘behemists’ a sect from the British revolution – and quite influential on Blake. Plus a couple of references to Swedenborg.
There are not very often opportunities for seeing Blake’s words and paintings in the flesh, exhibitions are few and there is no gallery built solely for him as the Turner bequest had done for Turner. Blake was a working man all his life, he lived in poverty, and he died penniless. The museum has a considerable number of his work – due to two substantial bequests (including Geoffrey Keynes). They are rarely aired, museums are wary of works on paper being displayed unless it’s guaranteed there’s no sunlight, & in the Fitzwilliam Museum the rooms where that is the case are either shut (long term) or in a constant shuffling series of curated exhibitions. Pretty much each institution housing large numbers of his work offer places where one can make appointments to view them - something I would strongly recommend people do. But that does not come easy to everyone, art institutions being rather intimidating. We need a permanent space devoted to William Blake.
[I don’t get how Philipp Otto Runge relates to Blake – his short privileged life and slightly dull compositions seem like another world to Blake. Still I understand it’s probable they had some shared influences]
The painting galleries are still arranged to impress…
[Tbf there are many amazing, beautiful and crazy things at the Fitzwilliam Museum; some wonderful manuscripts, objects, materials, ancient trinkets and gorgeous ceramics, and various research is being done back of house - academic and technical. The Egyptian galleries have signage showing work that has been going on there. There are two libraries, one of ancient manuscripts and the second a reference library - open to the public but you won’t find that written anywhere but the website - if you can find it on there. Where these things come from - whether they were bought or stolen - or whether exhibiting is appropriate for them - these are necessary questions…. But elsewhere.]
Joshua Reynolds holds space rather convincingly in the upper floors with just one painting. His arts, that flatter and promote his subjects as the great and the good – displayed amongst immortalised lawyers and financiers, duchesses and servants – offer images of luxury; and being luxurious. Easy to spell out the voluptuousness of high class living and stamp it with the sensuousness that extends the creeping desire to dazzle, to inspire desire, and confirm the equation of dominance and the desirable, and show who dominates. Recent rejigs have brought in subject matter of diaspora and gender presumably looking for some parity to balance out the shimmying upper classes. But that’s not balance. It’s not false equivocation - it’s plurality in the spectacle - discourse to contextualise the grandstanding of wealth gratuitous or impressive or serious. Values on a plateau and the values that dominate are the dominating values translated to simplistic aesthetics.
These are the pantheon of artists – mimetic and slavishly tasteful – slavishly respectful – that hold little or nothing.
William Blake was in the uncomfortable position of being a revolutionary and a heretic - his relationship with the antinomian heresy is expounded upon by E. P. Thompson in his book “Witness Against the Beast”. While republicans and dissenters were pretty common in London in his time - & vociferous support for the American revolution and (early on at least) for the French Revolution was widely spread - an incautious signed document could get one brought before the courts and potentially tortured and murdered by the crown. Blake was after all a strident republican and dissenter. Caution had to be an innate part of his poetry, and this has lead to a need for complex double meanings and purposeful obscurity. David V. Erdman In “Prophet Against Empire” stresses Blake’s terror at the thought of dealing with the law. It is the case that Blake was sensitive, intricate and profound thinker - who had a strong reason to render his thoughts anything but simply, plus there’s his place as a thinker very much antithetical to the ruling doctrines of then - and now. Any exhibition of Blake has some duty to unpick and lay out the whys and wherefores of his thinking but to do so would not simply challenge the institutions exhibiting but damn them for the frilly authoritarian mouth holes they have continued to be - beneficiaries of and complicit to horrors and atrocities.
William Blake would’ve hated the Fitzwilliam Museum.