by Jon Lackman | 13 April 2009 | Modern, Museums
The Tate Britain has reconstructed William Blake’s famously unheralded 1809 exhibition (it attracted only one review and no sales). Laura Cumming in the Observer is struck by Blake’s aesthetic:
Here are the streaming bodies – word made flesh – the long robes, loose hair, thunderclaps and starbursts. Here are the weightless figures in their graphic torsions: an uprush of souls, Satan, arms outstretched like a diva, Cain trying to rip his forehead in two. The symmetry is staggering: the soldiers casting lots for Christ’s cloak with the crucifix behind them like a bolt of lightning, the angels’ wing tips forming the apex of a triangle above the body of Christ, rigid and flat as a tomb.
Shape-shifters, skydivers, ectoplasms, wraiths, their every tendon revealed beneath transparent robes and skin: each figure is a figment of outline and wash that lives only on the page.
See also the Times, El Pais, and previews from the Independent, Times and Telegraph.
