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Tate recreates Blake's only one-man exhibition
Louise Jury, Chief Arts Correspondent17 Dec 2008
TATE Britain is to recreate the only one-man exhibition William Blake ever held.
The exhibition next spring will include 10 of the 16 works the artist put on show in his brother's shop in Golden Square, Soho, in May 1809.
The artist was already 52 when he decided to make a significant pitch to create a public reputation for himself as a painter. But the attempt failed.
The show, which included works such as Satan Calling up his Legions and The Soldiers Casting Lots for Christ's Garments, was not a success. It was poorly attended and received only a single, negative review.
Robert Hunt in The Examiner said: "The poor man fancies himself a great master, and has painted a few wretched pictures, some of which are unintelligible allegory, others an attempt at sober character by caricature representation and the whole blotted and blurred and very badly drawn.
"These he calls an Exhibition, of which he has published a Catalogue, or rather a farrago of nonsense, unintelligibleness, and egregious vanity, the wild effusions of a distempered brain."
The disappointment was a turning point in Blake's life. He withdrew from the public realm and become even more embittered about the state of the British art world than he was before.
The Tate is also to publish a new edition of the Descriptive Catalogue that Blake released to coincide with his exhibition. It was an important statement of his thinking as an artist and his views on the art world, and the publication will be the first time it has been made available to the general reader.
He addresses questions of art history, aesthetic value, technique and commerce in art and makes clear his extraordinary ambition. The exhibition will display works in the order originally shown with spaces for the works now lost. One work, Ancient Britains, has not been seen since the 19th century but will be represented by a 9ft by 12ft gap to show the scale on which he worked.
Blake was born to a middle-class family in London in 1757 and began engraving at an early age. By the time of his solo exhibition he had produced poetry and art such as Songs of Innocence and Experience, which are now regarded as the work of a Romantic visionary genius. But this was not acknowledged in his lifetime. He died aged 69 in 1827.
The free exhibition will run at Tate Britain from 20 April to 4 October.
