大二写的展评😳

William Blake and his visionary art
                                    —A review for the William Blake exhibition at the Tate Britain
          William Blake, born in 1757, was one of the most renowned British artists of the Romantic Age. He was trained at the Royal Academy as an engraver and printmaker, but found himself so out of step with the British artistic establishment. During his lifetime, his work was disparaged, ignored and ridiculed, but his fame swelled in the twentieth century. He was considered as a seminal figure in the history of poetry and visual art, his works were praised as being comparable to that of Byron, Keats, Shelley’s. His prophetic voice finally reawakened the spirit of the English people. The exhibition encompasses his prints, drawings and watercolors, some of which were the most iconic images in the history of British art. It was the largest show for Blake’s works for almost 20 years. By reconstructing a domestic interior in which Blake exhibited some of his works in 1809 and enlarging his works by digital technology, the exhibition engaged with the viewers’ sensory experience and present the viewers with a vividly depicted image of a rebellious and visionary artist— a truly enlightened man.  
           Blake’s reverence for classical antiquity was one of the reasons why he found himself so out of step with his contemporaries. His criticism on the academic snobbery was scathing, the academician’s arts were condemned of being commercially driven. Their figurative paintings were seen as a corruption of art. He referred to Joshua Reynolds as the “eminent dwarf of the art world” and stated that the “the grand style of Art is restored, in FRESCO, or Water-color Painting”. It was the dichotomy and tension between “high art” and commercial art that have been an impetus for his creations. In his own works there were to be found real Art, legacies of Raphael and Albrecht Dürer. His self portrait(Fig.1) reminds one of that of Albrecht Dürer’s(Fig.2). Blake was confidently gazing and communicating with the viewer, depicting himself as a visionary who knew that his visions would came true. His fascination with classical text was also exceptional, the exhibition included his illustrations for Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. It is not necessary for one to know the context of the Paradise and Purgatory to see Blake’s passion for the humanism spirit and his visceral reverence for the realm of the unknown. It was Blake’s tragedy to be born into the age of burgeoning materialism and industrialism which banished these visions to the fringes of human consciousness. 
         Blake’s development and accomplishments in art were exactly opposite to his evolution as a poet. While he wrote some of his finest poems by the age of twenty, his summit in artistic development came in his late years.  His best works included the illuminations to Jerusalem, the engravings to the Book of Job, and the water-colors for Dante’s Divine Comedy. The exhibition includes some of the illustrations for his epic poem Tiriel(Fig.3), where he combined ink, watercolor and chalk to create a subtle tonal effect. These works were aimed for reproduction in prints, but they are not adjunct to the texts. The scene was organized via two areas parallel to each other, foreground in which protagonists are woven together, and background depicting classical architecture as if a stage drama was going on. One could feel the tension and emotional responses from the protagonists. They were set against classical columns, evoking the setting of classical tragedies. Unfortunately, this series of drawings, which were accomplished artworks in their own rights, were not published due to the constraint of conventional publishing techniques.
 
        Blake invented a new form of printmaking called ‘relief etching’. This allowed him to combine  texts and images in a colored print. He used the technique to create a succession of visionary books, in which the illustrations were dense and painterly(Fig.4). In Blake’s opinion, prints were not merely the handmaiden of “high art”. The development of this new technique was not driven by commercial imperatives, given his criticism on the mechanism of art-making at the Royal Academy. For Blake prints are more than commercial exercises. They can be as expressive as paintings, they are potent tools for him to express his hallucinatory imaginations. He boasted that the relief etching technique would put him ahead of the greatest of writers: even Milton and Shakespeare could not publish their own works. 
        The exhibition offers us a rich visual and auditory experience. It reconstructed Blake’s family home in Broad Street, Soho, where he organized a retrospective exhibition of his work in 1809. His brother ran a hosiery shop there, the visitors would have entered the exhibition through the hosiery shop downstairs. It was a rather unusual exhibition setting. It actually echoed that Blake was in a particular tumultuous period. He suspected that the publisher Robert Cromek stole his ideas in the illustration for Robert Blair’s poem The Grave. Further, his exhibition itself could be considered as a failure, only a few visitors come, and his ambition were dismissed. He felt himself betrayed by the art world. This tumultuous situation was evoked in this reconstructed space, where the audience experience what it feels like to be walking long a shabby garret. The room was reduced to half the height of a normal museum space. The sound generated as they walk through the creaky wooden floorboards remind them of the crunchiness and fragility of the building, inviting them to sympathize with the unrecognized artist.
           To conclude, in the exhibition we see  Blake engaged in the social issues debated at the time, and at the same time contradicting the academic dogmas. He was ahead of his time, his mind seemed so exceptional yet unacceptable for his contemporaries. It would be two more centuries before Blake’s work receive the acclaim it deserved. He was an accomplished artist who kept on challenging his own creative force, who searched for what the Enlightenment Era called the “stranger within”. Blake was a man who was stubborn, ambitious, arrogant and even eccentric, all these qualities were represented in this exhibition. Just as the curator of this exhibition Martin Myrone suggested, he was the very “model of the autonomous genius and isolated visionary”.