Word: blakes
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...some of London's art fraternity to reply. Said Art Director James Laver of the Victoria and Albert Museum: "El Greco? Astigmatism? Admittedly! But the genius begins where the astigmatism ends." What Trevor-Roper had not dealt with was the artist's inner eye, i.e., imagination. William Blake once wrote that "a fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees." Perhaps El Greco's inner eye was also astigmatic...
...remnant of the Old World, the pushchart markets grew in the eighties and nineties, brought over by Poles, Russians, Chinese, Italians and Spaniards. Mott and Pearl Streets, Blake Avenue and Union Street became national boundaries; here was Warsaw, there Naples, and Shanghai was only two blocks from Kiev. The only border guards were streetlights, but international travel was infrequent...
...Show "Truth." Blake's time, like the 20th century, was an age of rapid change, revolutions and large-scale wars. Much of his writing, too, has a peculiarly modern urgency. Yet the spirit of Blake's pictures is far indeed from modern art. He worshiped Raphael, pored over gothic sculpture and illuminations, spent seven years as an apprentice engraver, and recommended endless copying of nature as the only means to transcend it. "The bad artist seems to copy a great deal," he wrote. "The good one really does." Instead of the common modern view that painting ought...
...example of Blake's insight, and how he could make composition carry it, is the Fogg Museum's Michael Binding Satan. The Archangel seems at first to be in command, but he himself is bound to the Dragon in a whirling struggle-as spirit is to matter, or day is to night. Recalling the Chinese symbol for Yang and Yin, the picture puts a cosmic interplay in concrete, dramatic terms...
...Creating the Universe records an actual vision that Blake once saw hovering at the top of his staircase. Such experiences were not uncommon with him; his wife once remarked that she saw very little of "Mr. Blake," for he "is always in paradise." Blake's vision of the creation embraces not paradise but chaos. Leaning into the storm from the circle of his own oneness and wholeness, God draws a second circle on the deep. It is a classic conception worthy of Michelangelo...