William Blake’s drawings, paintings, prints and illustrations are heavenly, cosmic, spiritual, mind-expanding and consciousness-raising. What they aren’t is large. The Yale Center for British Art, still flushed with excitement over its recent renovation and reopening, is displaying dozens of the artist/poet’s works in the new exhibit “William Blake: Burning Bright,” which is up through the end of November.
Despite the extraordinary artistry and larger-than-life themes, a Blake exhibit is seldom overwhelming. These are physically small works, many of them intended for small books. They don’t jump from the walls or command your attention. You have to walk right up close to them.
The YCBA has cunningly spread the Blake art — much of it from the museum’s own collection — delicately and elegantly. The most enchanting arrangement is a bank of pedestals where the cover pages from a series of Blake book projects resonate from upright freestanding glass frames.
Studying these artfully displayed artworks (mere browsing is simply not possible here) you can see how Blake, who lived from 1757 to 1827 and was the living embodiment of the phrase “ahead of his time,” influenced generations of British and American illustrators and book designers. He is able to make distant worlds seem accessible, the heavens touchable, gods human. There’s everything from a classical “virgin and child” biblical image to an amusing cartoon titled “I Want! I Want!” of a guy trying to climb a really long ladder up to the moon.
“William Blake: Burning Bright,” the first major exhibit of works by Blake at the YCBA in nearly three decades, has fittingly inspired its own new book bursting with Blake’s brilliance. “Blake,” a gorgeous 136-page hardcover volume published by the YCBA and distributed by Yale University Press, is written by Elizabeth Wyckoff, the curator of prints and drawings at the museum as well as the curator of the exhibit.
The exhibit also features the analytical essay “The Infernal Prism: Blake’s Colors Unbound” by Sarah T. Weston, assistant professor of English and of art history and archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. A sample Weston insight: “Blake, who so frequently married ‘contraries’ in his poetry 9innocence/experience, heaven/hell), may have been intrigued by opposing colors jarring against each other in our eye and on the surface of his page.”
Wyckoff’s book divides Blake’s work into sections of “Drawings, Watercolors and Tempera Paintings,” the “Infernal Method” the artist used to control how the text and illustration got etched together onto the page, “Commercial Engravings and Illustrations,” “Blake’s Original Illustrations,” the etchings from Blake’s book “Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion” and his “Late Engravings.”
Since Wyckoff’s book is more on a scale with the size of the original works, it is a terrific complement to the gallery show, allowing an opportunity to study these works in detail and at the reader’s leisure. He can be as funny/creepy as Edward Gorey with works like “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes” or the scratchy huddled-up skeleton etching from his “First Book of Urizon.”
Whether due to his innovative concepts and designs, his divine sense of color and texture or simply the compelling subject matter – just try to blithely flip the two-spread in the book that features “The Whirlwind of Lovers” and “The Baffled Devils Fighting” – Blake draws you in.
“William Blake: Burning Bright” is at the Yale Center for British Art through Nov. 30. Visiting hours are Tuesdays through Saturdays from10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sundays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Closed on Thanksgiving Day. Admission is free. britishart.yale.edu/.
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