Blake and Exhibitions, 2021
Luisa Calè (l.cale@bbk.ac.uk), Birkbeck, University of London, works on practices of reading, viewing, and collecting in the Romantic period. Her publications include Fuseli’s Milton Gallery: “Turning Readers into Spectators”; co-edited volumes on Dante on View: The Reception of Dante in the Visual and Performing Arts and Illustrations, Optics and Objects in Nineteenth-Century Literary and Visual Cultures; and special issues on “The Disorder of Things” (Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2011), “The Nineteenth-Century Digital Archive” (19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 2015), “Literature and Sculpture at the Fin de Siècle” (Word and Image, 2018), and “Sibylline Leaves” (Studies in Romanticism, 2020). Her current project, entitled The Book Unbound, explores practices of collecting and dismantling the book, with chapters on Walpole, Blake, and Dickens. She is the exhibitions editor for Blake.
Displays of Blake in 2021 were still affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, with many institutions closed, staff working from home, and moratoria on loans. Some institutions had their own Blakes on view, such as God Judging Adam at the Metropolitan Museum from October 2020 to mid-January 2021 and a plate from America a Prophecy at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. William Blake: Visionary, building on the Tate retrospective of 2019–20 and planned by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles for 2020, is now scheduled for late 2023.
The most significant event in the visual reception of Blake in 2021 was the seventh centenary of the death of the medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri, to whom Blake devoted 102 watercolors during the last years of his life. Although there were plans to show some of them, such as the intended loan of Melbourne Dantes to the unfortunately canceled Prado exhibition in Madrid, the watercolors were not among the works featured in the main Dante exhibitions of 2021. For conservation reasons, the Ashmolean Museum could not include watercolors from its own collection in Dante: The Invention of Celebrity, since they had been on view too recently at the Tate retrospective. Instead, it chose to showcase Blake’s engraving of “The Circle of the Lustful: Francesca da Rimini.” Of the eighteen heads of poets that Blake painted for the library of his patron William Hayley at Felpham in Sussex, Homer and Dryden have been on display at Manchester Art Gallery since 2006 to capture Blake and Hayley’s cosmopolitan canon, while the Dante portrait traveled to the Inferno exhibition at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome.
Experimentation with digital facsimiles was a remarkable feature in 2021. The Circle of the Lustful is at the center of the contemporary artist Melanie Smith’s Blakean tableau vivant and two-channel video work Vortex, while other Blake works are the basis for her pigment-on-wood Absent Leading Role Exercises. Another Dante centenary exhibition in Rome, La biblioteca di Dante at the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, included reproductions of some of Blake’s Dante watercolors within a digital iconography room with camera-obscura style multisensorial projection holoboxes.
13 April–10 July 2021
Parafin Gallery, London
Melanie Smith, Leave It to the Amateurs
The title of the exhibition captures a tableau vivant by Mexico-based British artist Melanie Smith. Smith’s encounter with Blake was shaped by the scholarship of Kathleen Raine and William Vaughan, the Blake Archive, and “the Topographic Sublime by Iain Sinclair, which I think, even without images conjures up brilliantly how Blake sucks us into seeing pain, anguish, urban paranoia ….”Communication with the artist. I am grateful to Celia Higson at Parafin Gallery for conveying my questions and Smith’s responses via e-mail in June 2021.
This tableau vivant, entitled Vortex, was commissioned by MUAC, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, and the Museo Amparo in Puebla. The live action was performed at MUAC, directed from the Museo Amparo, and projected simultaneously in both locations from May to October 2019. Smith worked with a choreographer, six cameramen, and twenty-eight dancers invited to participate in an unrehearsed (hence “amateur”) performance, in which they were called to take a random place on a swirling serpentine structure inspired by The Circle of the Lustful, Blake’s response to Inferno V in Dante’s Commedia. Blake’s vortex was translated into a choreography captured by six security cameras and projected on a computer screen 875 meters away. Blake acts as “a mentor of cobalt blue … conjuring a deranged cosmology of the future perfect tense, as visible as incorporeal beings on CCTV monitors.”Melanie Smith, “Leave It to the Amateurs,” Melanie Smith: Farsa y artificio/Farce and Artifice (Mexico City: MUAC, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, 2019) 53 (exhibition catalogue: MACBA, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona [18 May–7 October 2018]; MUAC, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, UNAM, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City [25 May–6 October 2019]; and Museo Amparo, Puebla [25 May–7 October 2019]). Smith shares her response to Blake in “Melanie Smith and the Influence of Blake,” Hell’s Printing Press (28 June 2021): <https://blog.blakearchive.org/2021/06/28/melanie-smith-and-the-influence-of-blake>. Smith’s tableau vivant animates Blake’s blue palette to produce a carefully constructed “symmetrical, multi-source illusion,” a “hallucination” that alludes to “bisexual lighting,” “the simultaneous use of blue, pink, and purple light—the colors of the bisexual flag—in nightclubs, film, and television.”Alejandra Labastida, “The Symptoms of Turbulence: Or, If You Peer into the Vortex, You’ll See the Spiral City,” Melanie Smith 15 and note 3. Playing with the possibilities of still lives and moving pictures, the CCTV footage “reveals fragments of the painting being constructed and deconstructed, but it never reaches a static conclusion.” The random permutations capture work in progress, activating and frustrating the expectation that they might be recomposed into a retroactive still frame, a pregnant moment “in which past, present, and future all collapse into a single gaze.”Labastida (Melanie Smith 17), drawing on Sean Carney’s Brecht and Critical Theory: Dialectics and Contemporary Aesthetics (New York: Routledge, 2005) 104. José Luis Barrios teases out the Deleuzian dimensions of Smith’s tableaux vivants, from Bruegel and Bosch to Blake: “Becoming-shot (internal duration) … disassembled into several cameras … distending a single scene for two and a half hours.” For Barrios, Smith transforms “art and literature into the index of a sensation. At the point where the duration of a thing’s state, its affection, coincides with saturated physical framings and with a spatial unfolding across multiple channels, what obtains is a sensory bloc of pure time at the surface: a pure time-image of lustfulness.”José Luis Barrios, “Melanie Smith, Farce and Artifice: When Humor Pierces the Imaginary,” Melanie Smith 41-42.
In the 2021 London exhibition, the route from the street was mediated by the filter of blue glass doors, which prepared visitors for the blue world of Smith’s Blakean Dante. After passing a retro TV screen projecting a visual animation of a vortex algorithm, spectators entered the space of the Circle of the Lustful: a big-screen installation entitled Vortex: Two Channel Video Work at the end of the room, marked by an expanded chromatic area defined by cobalt blue walls, carpeting, and cushions. The video work was supplemented by Amateur Leading Role photographs taken on the same day as the performance.
While the Mexican performative reenactment of The Circle of the Lustful was deterritorialized and fragmented by the CCTV footage projected on the screen upstairs, downstairs Smith’s multimedia chromatic experiments were documented by two walls of collages, including occasional small details of naked bodies and newspaper cutouts produced after the video was made. These collages connect Smith’s multimedial explorations to the material culture of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, a comparative method underpinned by photographic reproductions: In making the Atlas, Warburg believed that by juxtaposing symbolic images in different sequences the images themselves take on a different pathos or animated life, which he called “thought-image.” I think in this way by focusing on the fragment, background, brushstroke in (my) paintings and then zooming in facial expressions, body parts and “stillness” in the video, a strange space opens up. One medium very much depends on the other, because one comes from memory/history (painting) and the other (video) comes from a virtual space where contemporary-mestizo bodies take on a performative role. … In my way I was very much thinking of the political context in Mexico. More than taking a topographical approach, I focused on Warburg’s “thought-image” and the bridging of imaginaries; the precariousness of life conditions in Mexico, and Blake’s capacity to portray dispossessed figures.Communication with the artist, June 2021.
Smith’s analysis of Blake’s infernal lovescape required a process of abstraction or decomposition in which the scene was emptied of its bodies so that the snake-shaped spiral that Blake imagined in order to convey their vortex-like propulsion could be translated into a theatrical prop on which twenty-first-century Mexican amateur actors would place themselves as they reenacted the scene as a tableau vivant. This process of decomposition is the governing principle of Smith’s Absent Leading Role Exercises (2019), pigment-on-wood works exhibited downstairs at Parafin Gallery. These interventions deconstruct Blake’s compositions by taking out the main figure(s), using Photoshop to zoom in, “sometimes blowing out of proportion one detail or texture.”Communication with the artist, June 2021. As a result, the paintings lose their narrative anchoring, leaving a void contour to mark the absent space that the main character used to inhabit: “The roles have been reversed and the melodrama of the paintings is presented as a series of abstract scenic backdrops.”From Smith’s description at Hell’s Printing Press (see note 2). Smith’s interventions operate in the style of surrealist “outographs”—photographs in which the subject has been cut out—or sculptures that capture the empty space enveloping an object by transforming it into a mold and marking the object itself as negative space, as in Rachel Whiteread’s works. The process of disanchoring references the artwork by way of outlines marking absent forms. In addition to Dante illustrations, including the numinous red clouds from Dante and Virgil Approaching the Angel Who Guards the Entrance of Purgatory (Butlin #812.78) and the vortex in Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car (Butlin #812.88), Smith practiced her art of decomposition on Newton, The Book of Thel, “The Ancient of Days,” Jacob’s Ladder (Butlin #438), and Satan Smiting Job with Sore Boils (Butlin #807). The display of these works as single paintings, diptychs, triptychs, or series is random: “This is a sort of loose jigsaw puzzle that is not established until the final hang of the paintings. None [is] specifically made to be the ‘other half ’ of another, but there are different visual compositions and strange juxtapositions that arise through different combinations.”Communication with the artist, June 2021.
23 June–15 December 2021
Swedenborg House, London
The Story of Swedenborg in 27 Objects (curated by museum director Stephen McNeilly)
Exhibition guide: Stephen McNeilly. The Story of Swedenborg in 27 Objects. London: Swedenborg Society, 2021. 32 pp.
This display captured the life and legacy of Emmanuel Swedenborg through a collection of objects, including his walking stick and locks of his hair; a miniature wax bust by John Flaxman; the correspondence of the suffragette Josephine Butler with Swedenborg translator and Blake scholar J. J. Garth Wilkinson; and manuscript notebooks for the Japanese translation of Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell by D. T. Suzuki, whose publications about Zen Buddhism had an impact on Allen Ginsberg, among others.
“Satan Going Forth from the Presence of the Lord and Job’s Charity” [plate numbered 5], Illustrations of the Book of Job (1826).
Swedenborg Society, purchased 2018.
“The Fall of Satan” [plate numbered 16], Illustrations of the Book of Job (1826).
Swedenborg Society, purchased 2018.
“Job’s Sacrifice” [plate numbered 18], Illustrations of the Book of Job (1826).
Swedenborg Society, purchased 2018.
6 July–30 September 2021
Strawberry Hill House and Garden, Twickenham
In Focus: Goldfish Bowl (curated by Silvia Davoli)
The exhibition included facsimiles of Blake’s watercolors for Thomas Gray’s “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat. Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes,” part of an extra-illustrated copy of Gray’s poems made for Ann Flaxman, now at the Yale Center for British Art. The facsimiles were in a glass cabinet between the Tribune and the Great North Bedchamber at Strawberry Hill.
17 September 2021–9 January 2022
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
Dante: The Invention of Celebrity (curated by Gervase Rosser)
Exhibition catalogue: Gervase Rosser. Dante: The Invention of Celebrity. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2021.
The Ashmolean Dante exhibition started elegantly with Salvador Dalí’s first illustration to the Commedia, showing Dante tracing his steps through a metaphysically bare page. The reception of Dante was documented from Renaissance illustrated editions to Tom Phillips’s Commedia (1983), L’Inferno di Lorenzo Mattotti (1999), and Geoff MacEwan’s 2010 etching “Dante’s Vision of Divinity.”
Blake’s engraving “The Circle of the Lustful,” illustrating canto V of the Inferno, was part of a vitrine dedicated to Dante’s women and the theme of love. On one side was John Flaxman’s line engraving of Paolo and Francesca (1793), and on the other a commemorative medal designed by Luigi Gori for the Beatrice exhibition of 1890 (private collection) and a reproduction of Henry Holiday’s painting The Meeting of Dante and Beatrice (1884; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool). Hanging behind them on the wall were early twentieth-century postcards of the meeting of Dante and Beatrice at Santa Trinita Bridge in Florence, inspired by Holiday’s painting; an engraving of Rachel and Leah from Dante’s dream in canto VII of the Purgatorio; and an art-nouveau postcard by Enzo Anichini representing Paolo and Francesca.
“The Circle of the Lustful: Francesca da Rimini” (“The Whirlwind of Lovers”), Blake’s Illustrations of Dante (engraved 1826–27).
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, WA1941.27.1.
29 September 2021–20 March 2022
Bodleian Library, Oxford
Melancholy: A New Anatomy (curated by Kathryn Murphy, John Geddes, Richard Lawes, Simon D. Kyle, Stephen Puntis, Gulamabbas Lakha, Kate Saunders, Phil Burnet, and Joseph Butler)
To mark the fourth centenary of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), the exhibition brought together Oxford experts in humanities and mental health to show “how Burton’s holistic and multifaceted conception of cure finds surprising echoes in contemporary psychiatry and prescriptions for mental health.” “A Cradle Song” was presented in the section on “Sleeping and Waking” because it chimes with Burton’s interest in the curative effects of sweet sounds and being “lulled into peaceful, restorative sleep.” “The Lord Answering Job out of the Whirlwind,” from Illustrations of the Book of Job, was chosen for its “powerful connections with modern psychotherapy, empowering the individual through a renewed sense of self and reframing perspectives.”I am grateful to Ellen Hausner at the Bodleian Library for sharing the exhibition’s captions.
“A Cradle Song,” Songs of Innocence copy L (composed and printed 1789).
Bodleian Library, Oxford, Arch. G e.42.
“The Lord Answering Job out of the Whirlwind” [plate numbered 13], Illustrations of the Book of Job (1826).
Danson Library, Trinity College, Oxford, Blake print no. 13.
8 October 2021–16 January 2022
Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Rome
La biblioteca di Dante [Dante’s Library] (curated by Roberto Antonelli, Ebe Antetomaso, Marco Guardo, and Lorenzo Mainini)
Exhibition catalogue: Roberto Antonelli and Lorenzo Mainini, eds. La biblioteca di Dante. Rome: Bardi, 2021. 384 pp.
This centenary exhibition included digital copies of Blake’s Dante illustrations in the final digital iconography section, entitled “Paesaggi e personaggi della Commedia. Un’iconografia digitale” [“Landscapes and Characters from the Commedia: A Digital Iconography”], curated by Roberto Andreotti and Federico De Melis, designed by OpenLab Company, and coproduced with MIC, Istituto Centrale per il Patrimonio Immateriale [CMI, Central Institute for Immaterial Heritage].
After a reconstruction of the medieval world of Dante’s imagination—exploring what he might have read through an extraordinary and extensive collection of medieval manuscripts in the splendid frescoed rooms of the academy’s library at the Palazzo Corsini—the digital iconography section was enveloped in darkness, with light coming from a series of multisensorial “holoboxes.”
Station 2, “Pier della Vigna e l’Italia Federiciana” [“Pier della Vigna and Frederician Italy”], was devoted to Dante’s depiction of self-inflicted violence in canto XIII of the Inferno. A digital file of Blake’s The Wood of the Self-Murderers: The Harpies and the Suicides (Butlin #812.24) was projected alongside visual documentation of the Frederician court of Pier della Vigna, with photographs of Castel del Monte in Puglia, portraits and sculptural evidence of the emperor from the Metropolitan Museum, and visual responses to Dante’s scene across the centuries, from Priamo della Quercia to Pinelli, Doré, Dalí, and Martini, accompanied by a dissonant soundtrack.
Station 3, “Ulisse o la vertigine del conoscere” [“Ulysses or the Vertigo of Knowing”], devoted to fraudulent counselors in Inferno XXVI, projected Ulysses and Diomed Swathed in the Same Flame (Butlin #812.55), together with works by de Groux, Martini, Böcklin, Rothaug, Flaxman, Bauchant, Cagli, and Cambellotti.
Station 5, “Manfredi, Purgatorio e Benevento” [“Manfredi, Purgatorio, and Benevento”], marked the ascent of the Mount of Purgatory with two details from Blake’s illustration from Purgatorio IV (Butlin #812.74), as well as objects that provided a historical mise-en-scène and works by Doré, Bronzino, Botticelli, Flaxman, Zuccari, Nattini, and Martini.
15 October 2021–23 January 2022
Scuderie del Quirinale, Rome
Inferno (curated by Jean Clair)
Exhibition catalogue: Jean Clair and Laura Bossi, eds. Inferno. Milan: Electa, 2021. 480 pp. Includes Michael Edwards, “Blake nell’inferno dantesco.”
The portrait of Dante that Blake painted for William Hayley’s library hung on the information wall of the section entitled “L’inferno di Dante: Il Canone Illustrato”/“Dante’s Inferno: The Illustrated Canon,” in the middle of the lower floor of the exhibition.
Michael Edwards’s catalogue essay complements what was on view in the exhibition with a choice of watercolors (pp. 191-94): The Vestibule of Hell and the Souls Mustering to Cross the Acheron (Butlin #812.5), The Circle of the Lustful: Francesca da Rimini (Butlin #812.10), Dante and Virgil Escaping from the Devils (Butlin #812.43 recto), and The Stygian Lake with the Ireful Sinners Fighting (Butlin #812.15).
Dante Alighieri (c. 1800–03). Butlin #343.4.
Manchester Art Gallery, 1885.16.
Reproduced in Inferno 217, cat. no. 65.