Word: blakely
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Graphic art has very rarely taken on the quality of music. It did so in the work of William Blake. At its best, Blake's line drawing has the airy movement and harmony of a string quartet. This is not all it has. On a few square inches of white paper Blake could and did put forms comparable in grandeur to the frescoes of Michelangelo. Few if any exhibitions this season had more artistic interest than a comprehensive show of Blake which opened last week at the Philadelphia Museum...
...rooms in that ungainly, unfinished and unfilled neoclassic edifice sufficed to hold examples of almost all of Blake's work. No foreign loans were on hand because, alone among English artists of the first rank, Blake could be represented completely by loans from U. S. collections. Philadelphians were gracefully assured of Blake's greatness in a catalogue introduction by Book-bibber A. (for Alfred) Edward Newton...
Born in London in 1757, William Blake impressed his parents at the age of four by seeing God's head in the window. No mere precocity, this faculty of imaginative vision remained his extraordinary endowment throughout life. Before he was 20 he learned the craft of engraving and wrote his Poetical Sketches, the purest lyric poetry of the century. At 24 he married a girl who could neither read nor write. Blake might have had worldly advancement but it scared him. In 1795, when someone got him the offer of a post as Tutor in Drawing to the Royal...
...that time Blake had worked out a method of color printing by which he produced editions of his own symbolic and prophetic writings from engraved plates, with his drawings as "illuminations." These books are famous. He was, then and later, thought crazy for lines like this: "Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires." After 100 years the idea became Freudian and hence something to think about...
...Blake's appearance was handsome, resolute and rather wild, with very large eyes. His theory of art excluded ordinary realism, involved an utter dependence on imagination and on clear and perfect line in rendering it. "All the copies, or pretended copies of Nature, from Rembrandt to Reynolds, prove that Nature becomes to its victim nothing but blots and blurs." What sources his work had were in Renaissance pictures which he knew through his own large collection of prints. His masterwork, done after he was 50, consisted of pencil and watercolor illustrations such as The Temptation...