William Blake’s Universe review – polymath’s paintings are outclassed by the Germans

Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
A wide-ranging exhibition on the English mystic makes unfortunate comparisons with his European contemporaries who, it turns out, are the far superior Romantics

If any artist was ever a one-off it’s William Blake. To start with, “artist” isn’t quite the right word for Blake who is also one of the greatest poets in the English language. His images and his words are intertwined in his (very) limited edition illuminated books, printed as he puts it in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell “in the infernal method, by corrosives … melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid”.

Putting on a good exhibition of this artist is no mean feat, for you have to give instant visual access to a mind whose original, often obscure ideas take 944 pages to express in my edition of Blake’s Complete Writings. Cambridge flunks it. The Fitzwilliam Museum gets so distracted by other artists that it never really takes you into Blake’s “Universe”, as the show’s title promises.

Continue reading...