William Blake: hello, goodbye
“Satan Exulting over Eve” (1795), by William Blake; graphite, pen and black ink, and watercolor. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los AngelesBlake was here, now he’s not “Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Plate 42, ‘The Tyger’” (1794), by William Blake; color-printed relief etching with watercolor. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon CollectionThe invisible Visionary at the Getty Center William Blake, who died in 1827, is yet another casualty in 2020. The English printmaker, painter-illustrator, and poet-painter (who among us doesn’t know “Tyger, Tyger, burning bright…”?) was to have had the starring role in “William Blake: Visionary,” a Getty show that should have run from July to October. However, there exists a catalogue for the suspended exhibition, which originated at the Tate Britain in London and then made the leap, with additional loaned work, to Los Angeles. Edina Adam, the Getty’s assistant curator of drawings, and Julian Brooks, the senior curator of drawings, were at the helm of the now-phantom show. Blake is among those artists who slip through our attempts at classification or pigeonholing, sort of like the late Henry Darger. An outsider artist, in other words…
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