A Visit to the Morgan

I got a chance to see  “William Blake’s World: ‘A New Heaven is Begun’” this past weekend at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City. The exhibit’s title refers to Blake’s own Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in which he notes that his birth marks the occasion when “a new heaven is begun, and it is not thirty-three years since its advent.” Blake’s belief that he was the inheritor of an artistic tradition pre-figured in Milton and Michelangelo drove him to create works that revealed an extraordinary outlook on religion, philosophy, and artistic creation. This exhibit seeks to captures key moments in the evolution and development of Blake’s works and frameworks, and is particularly focused on framing Blake’s apocalyptic-artistic vision alongside the more pressing demands of the contemporary marketplace. The Morgan has also put up an online version of the exhibit, available here.

The exhibit includes a fantastic and carefully displayed selection of Blake’s more and less familiar works, from early commissions to letters and copies of later illuminated works like the Butts Set of The Book of Job. Also making an appearance are several works by the “Ancients,” a group of Blake followers that included John Linnell, Edward Calvert, and Samuel Palmer, as well as works by other contemporary artists and friends of Blake like Henry Fuseli. These serve both to put Blake in the context of contemporary artists, and to reveal his own deep influences and interactions with the people around him. The choice to include these works firmly grounds Blake in the society surrounding him, and serves partially to interrogate the (very Romantic) myth of the solitary genius, creating from his own visions while shunning the outside world. Blake’s formal training, his commissions, and the works of his friends all place him squarely within the business of artistic production and the London marketplace, while also pointing to the revolutionary role he played in aesthetics and poetics.

The exhibit presents us with several stages of Blake’s works, beginning with a few of his early engravings finished just after his apprenticeship, including Morning Amusement and Evening Amusement, after Jean-Antoine Watteau. Many of these works were designed to showcase his engraving abilities, although he failed to garner many large commissions.

Following these early engravings are selected works from Blake’s contemporaries, including the Ancients. The Ancients adopted Blake’s appreciation of earlier art, especially the works of Michelangelo and Milton. What struck me most about many of these works, though, was their seeming break from artistic tradition. John Flaxman’s “Awake, arise, rouse her as I rose thee. The Furies” and “Behold this proud oppressor of my country; Choephora“ were praised as hearkening back to classical forms, but they seem also to prefigure the style of the Decadent period in the fin-de-siecle, which valued symbolism as well as more abstract, artificial forms. Blake’s works are often described as breaking artistic boundaries and being ahead of their time, and it’s clear from this exhibit that he influenced others to do the same. As perhaps another prefiguration, Samuel Palmer’s Pear Tree in a Walled Garden struck me because of its proto-Impressionistic style and subtle, rich coloring.

After works from the Ancients and other contemporary artists, the viewer comes to Blake’s Job. The Morgan notes in its online exhibit that

The story of Job is of a good man sorely tested in order to understand the relationship between the evil of suffering and the existence of God. In Blake’s version, Job’s major flaw is attending to the letter, rather than the spirit, of God’s law. In doing so, Job falls under Satan’s spell and his suffering progresses into the horrible vision of a cloven-hoofed demon in the eleventh plate, Job’s Evil Dreams.

The exhibit showcases the Butts Set, plus two additional plates Blake did later for John Linnell. The Butts Set was completed in 1805-6, and the Linnell additions (added to both the Butts and Linnell Sets) were done later, around 1821. The Book of Job is one of the focal points of the exhibit, and is the largest work included in the exhibit. Although based on a familiar Biblical account, the work merges Blake’s artistic and religious philosophies to become something altogether new and revolutionary. Job’s attendance to the “letter, rather than the spirit, of God’s law” gets at Blake’s essential idea, presented in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, that

All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors.

1. That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body & a Soul.

2. That Energy, call’d Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason, call’d Good, is alone from the Soul.

3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.

But the following Contraries to these are True

1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.

2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.

3. Energy is Eternal Delight.

Also included are Blake’s earlier Continental Prophecies, Europe, The Song of Los, Jerusalem, and America. These were particularly striking in person, where their beautiful coloring can be seen firsthand, without the mediation of a computer screen or a less-than-perfect reproduction. The works focus on revolution and upheaval, in which figures like the fiery Orc, the spirit of revolt, take on the powers of Blake’s despotic Urizen.

The final mounted works I came to were his illustrations of Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso. Having these placed last on the wall as you walk around the exhibit (or, alternatively, first, depending on which way you choose to go after walking through the door) brings you back full circle to Blake’s predecessors — to those artists he felt were his creative ancestors.

The exhibit also included several cases of materials ranging from letters to commercial book illustrations and depictions of visions, as well as other works like All Religions are One and There Is No Natural Religion. Here again, the museum has sought to illuminate Blake’s spiritual visions alongside his commercial work, calling our attention to both sides of his creative process. One example of this is Case IV, which includes both Blake’s (very humorous) illustrations for William Hayley’s Ballads (look for the dog saving his master from a crocodile by offering himself up to the jaws of the beast), along with Blake’s vision of Wat Tyler, the leader of a fourteenth-century revolt against the poll tax. The Morgan notes that “Blake [perhaps] felt a kinship [with Tyler] based upon his own antimonarchical stance that had led to a trial for sedition in Felpham a few years earlier.” This sketch, done in 1819, was the last in a series of visions Blake sketched for his friend John Varley.

The Morgan has done a phenomenal job of capturing critical moments in Blake’s life and work. This exhibit allows each of us to move through Blake’s evolving spiritual and artistic philosophies while retaining his very important link to contemporary artists, his own training and background, and the swiftly-changing requirements of the literary and artistic marketplace of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The exhibit runs until January 3, 2010, at the Morgan Library and Museum.

Van Gogh’s Letters

We just got word about a new digital edition of all extant letters from and to Vincent Van Gogh: Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters.

From the press release:

The edition is based on fifteen years of research. For each of the 902 letters the site gives a transcription of the original Dutch or French, a translation into English, a full (zoomable)  facsimile, comprehensive annotation, and illustrations (about 2000 in all) of the works of art discussed in the letters and annotations.

The Blake Archive has very recently started transcribing and encoding Blake’s letters, so we’re very interested in other online letter projects.

Publication Announcement: Wollstonecraft Drawings

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of an electronic edition of Blake’s ten monochrome wash drawings illustrating Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life and the first and second editions of the book containing Blake’s six engravings of his designs.  The designs and inscribed texts in all three series are fully searchable and are supported by our Inote and ImageSizer applications.

In 1788, Joseph Johnson published the first edition of Mary Wollstonecraft’s morally instructive narrative for children, Original Stories from Real Life; with Conversations, Calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness. A few years later, Johnson decided to issue a new edition, for which he commissioned Blake to prepare a series of illustrations.  Blake’s extant drawings, now in the Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress, are datable to c. 1791.  In addition to these ten designs, Blake must have executed at least one further drawing as a preliminary for his fifth plate; this drawing is untraced.  Six designs were selected for publication in the 1791 edition of Wollstonecraft’s book; Blake engraved the designs himself.  The first and second states of Blake’s plates appear variously in copies of the 1791 edition.  The second edition to contain Blake’s plates was published by Johnson in 1796; it contains the third (final) states of Blake’s plates. The copy of the 1791 edition now in the Archive is from the Huntington Library; it contains the second states of the plates.  The copy of the 1796 edition in the Archive is from the Essick collection and contains the third (final) states of the plates.

Modern interpreters of the illustrations have detected a pictorial critique of Wollstonecraft’s stories.  Blake appears to have found her morality too calculating, rationalistic, and rigid.  He represents Wollstonecraft’s spokesperson, Mrs. Mason, as a domineering presence. From Blake’s perspective, Mason’s acts of charity are excessively condescending and tend to reinforce the underlying social conditions that create disparities between wealth and poverty.  As Blake wrote in “The Human Abstract,” “Pity would be no more, / If we did not make somebody Poor.”

With this publication, the Archive adds a new set of scholarly tools. These tools, known collectively as our Related Works system, are designed to show relationships among works and individual objects in the Archive. They function at two levels. First, work index pages now include active links to related materials in the Archive (for example, a set of preliminary sketches for a group of engravings).

Second, the “Show Me” menu on object view pages now includes “Related Works in the Archive.” Like the work-level menu, this list includes active links to the related objects and is meant to allow study of the related materials side-by-side.

The Wollstonecraft illustrations are the first publication in the Archive to use this feature.

As always, the William Blake Archive is a free site, imposing no access restrictions and charging no subscription fees. The site is made possible by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the cooperation of the international array of libraries and museums that have generously given us permission to reproduce works from their collections in the Archive.

Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, editors
Ashley Reed, project manager, William Shaw, technical editor
The William Blake Archive

More at the Morgan

Two additional events in conjunction with the Blake exhibit at the Morgan Library & Musuem:

Thursday, October 8 at 6:30 p.m.
“Blake’s Enlightened Graphics: Illuminated Books and New Technologies,” Joseph Viscomi

Thursday, November 19 at 7:30 p.m.
“Blake in Poetry and Song: An Evening with Patti Smith.” Patti Smith and her daughter will do an evening of poetry and music inspired by Blake.

A bit on Blake in the NY Times here.

John Unsworth at the University of Rochester

John Unsworth, Dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, will be visiting the University of Rochester next Wednesday and Thursday, September 16 and 17. Unsworth will be heading a workshop on “Big Data” in the Humanities, as well as speaking about Google Books and current issues and controversies surrounding digital publishing and copyright. More information is forthcoming! The workshop is scheduled for 1-3 pm on Sept. 16th (Hawkins-Carlson Room), and the lecture is 4:30-6 on Sept. 17th (Welles/Brown Room).

Unsworth founded Postmodern Culture, the first peer-reviewed electronic Humanities journal (now published within Project Muse). He also organized and chaired the TEI Consortium. Many of Unsworth’s writings are available from his CV.

Upcoming Blake Exhibit at the Morgan Library & Musuem

Blake Press Release

From the website:

William Blake’s World: “A New Heaven Is Begun”
September 11, 2009, through January 3, 2010

+Zoom William Blake (1757–1827) Behemoth and Leviathan, ca. 1805–10 [Book of Job, no. 15] Pen and black and gray ink, gray wash, and watercolor, over faint indications in pencil, on paper 10 1/16 x 7 3/4 inches (272 x 197 mm) Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1903; 2001.77

Visionary and nonconformist William Blake (1757–1827) is a singular figure in the history of Western art and literature: a poet, painter, and printmaker. Ambitiously creative, Blake had an abiding interest in theology and philosophy, which, during the age of revolution, inspired thoroughly original and personal investigations into the state of man and his soul. In his lifetime Blake was best known as an engraver; he was later recognized for his innovations across many other disciplines.

In the Morgan’s first exhibition devoted to Blake in two decades, former director Charles Ryskamp and curators Anna Lou Ashby and Cara Denison have assembled many of Blake’s most spectacular watercolors, prints, and illuminated books of poetry to dramatically underscore his genius and enduring influence. William Blake’s World: “A New Heaven Is Begun”—the subtitle a quote from Blake referring to the significance of his date of birth—is on view from September 11, 2009, to January 3, 2010.

The show includes more than 100 works and among the many highlights are two major series of watercolors, rarely displayed in their entirety. The twenty-one watercolors for Blake’s seminal illustrations for the Book of Job—considered one of his greatest works and revealing his personal engagement with biblical texts—were created about 1805–10. Also on view are twelve drawings illustrating John Milton’s poems L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, executed about 1816–20. Both series were undertaken for Blake’s principal patron, Thomas Butts.

In addition to the superlative watercolor series—twenty-one illustrations to the Book of Job and twelve designs illustrating Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso—other important drawings are on display, including Fire (ca. 1805), which addresses the subject of war. The more fully expressed Continental Prophecies, a series of three illuminated books, further showcase Blake’s talents as a visual artist and his passionate interest in politics.

Blake’s fame as a poet is seen in his fair copy of ballads known as The Pickering Manuscript, named after its early owner and publisher. Giving voice to Blake’s well-known poem “Auguries of Innocence,” found in the manuscript, is the actor Jeremy Irons, who has also recorded the shorter poem, “Tyger.” These can be heard on a gallery listening station and on the Morgan’s Web site.

Blake supported himself with his engravings, and a selection of his prints—many of which are extremely rare impressions—documents this important aspect of his production. A magnificent example of Blake’s largest print, touched with watercolor by the artist, depicts Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims. With this work the artist hoped for commercial success, something he was unable to secure in his lifetime.

Among Blake’s crowning achievements as a visual artist and poet are his illuminated books, such as Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul (ca. 1794). These works, which also showcase his exceptional technical skills, reflect medieval manuscript illumination and the interrelationship between word and image. Also on view is the only dated copy of Blake’s dramatic The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Shedding light on the artistic milieu surrounding Blake are a number of works by friends and contemporaries, including drawings by younger artists such as John Linnell (1792–1882) and members of a group that assembled around Blake and called themselves the Ancients. Also represented are works by painters such as Samuel Palmer (1805–1881) and Henry Fuseli (1741–1825).

This exhibition is made possible through the generosity of Fay and Geoffrey Elliott.

New Blogs and Old Spaces

The Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art & Architecture (an ASECS affiliate) has just launched Enfilade.  Though a serial newsletter primarily intended for HECAA members,  Enfilade includes CFPs for architecture and visual culture, exhibition announcements, art auction notes, fellowship information, and “the 18th century in the news.”

Like the appropriately named The Hoarding, a blog “devoted to reporting recent work in British Romantic and Victorian literature,” Enfilade takes its name from an eighteenth-century architectural feature. From The Hoarding’s about page:

According to the OED, a hoarding is a nineteenth-century term for “a temporary fence made of boards inclosing a building while in course of erection or repair; often used for posting bills and advertisements; hence, any boarding on which bills are posted.”

James Orlando Parry, "A London Street Scene" (1835)

Where a Victorian “hoarding” seems a layered, visually chaotic space, the “enfilade” emphasizes the linearity of organized space. From Enfilade’s A Note on the Name:

Enfilade is intended to encapsulate the sense in which various entries are threaded together along a central axis (in this case the order of the postings).Throughout the eighteenth century — in the realm of the ideal plan as well as often enough in life itself — the enfilade served to organize space and vision.

Jacques-François Blondel, Château de Vendeuvre (Normandy), 1750s. Wikimedia Commons.

As many panel sessions for the 2010 ASECS conference can attest, there is remarkable interest in the intersections between eighteenth-century culture and digital technologies. Panel sessions range from new understandings of epistolary novels through the lens of blogging, miscroblogging, and email; critical responses to (and solutions for) databases of eighteenth-century texts; and digital tools and strategies for teaching the eighteenth-century. Yet another correspondence seems to be repurposing provocative terms for historical spaces to describe the “new” digital spaces of academic blogging.

Fall Institute in Digital Libraries and Humanities

From the institute announcement:

Announcing: FIDLH 2009: The Second Annual Fall Institute in Digital Libraries and Humanities.

FIDLH 2008 was held at the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, NM, September 25th, 26th, and 27th thanks to the support of the Electronic Text Centre at UNB libraries, the Digital Culture Observatory at Acadia University, and the University of New Brunswick and Acadia University.

More than 30 librarians, library staff, humanists, and students attended FIDLH 2008, and all reported a very positive and collegial learning experience. FIDLH 2009 will be held at Acadia University, in Wolfville, NS, September 24th, 25th, and 26th. This year, as last, the cost will be $300.00 per employed participant and $100.00 per student. Acadia’s Office of Graduate Studies and Research has offered to help defer the cost of student participation, so depending on the number of students who register student costs will be slightly or signigicantly less than the $100.00 posted rate. One day participation will also be available at a rate of $100.00.

Each of the three days will begin with a plenary talk on a topic of interest to those in attendance, followed by a morning and an afternoon workshop in which participants will choose from among the following offerings: using the Open Journal Systems (OJS) for electronic journal management, XML encoding for journal articles, Data Conversation and Digital Imaging, Tools for Text Analysis, Concepts in Text Analysis, Designing and Implementing Usability Tests, and Using Computer Games in Teaching.

Participants should plan to bring their own laptop or netbook computer. A limited number of laptops will be available to rent.

Registration for FIDLH 2009 will open July 24, and is accessible through our website.

We look forward to seeing you this fall in the beautiful Annapolis Valley.

Richard Cunningham, Associate Professor
English and Theatre
Director, ADCO
Acadia University
Wolfville, NS B4P 2R6

Erik Moore
Director of the ETC
UNB Libraries
Fredericton, NB E3B 5H5

Tracing the Evolution of the Blogosphere

Salon.com recently published an excerpt from Scott Rosenberg’s new book, Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters (Crown Publishing 2009).  The book chronicles the rise and continuing evolution of blogging, along with its effects on social interactions, business, politics, and all other areas of culture and society. Especially interesting is Rosenberg’s claim that “We talk too much about television as an antecedent to the Web, and not enough about the telephone.” While the Internet and computing technology in general draws much from TV with regard to interface, the telephone, with its focus on communication and shared information, is just as useful to think about as a major predecessor.

Big-media efforts to use the Net for the delivery of old-fashioned one-way products have regularly failed or underperformed. Social uses of our time online — email, instant messaging and chat, blogging, Facebook-style networking — far outstrip time spent in passive consumption of commercial media. In other words, businesspeople have consistently overestimated the Web’s similarities to television and underestimated its kinship to the telephone.

Rosenberg also notes that the same anxieties that surrounded the telephone in its early years are now being resuscitated to fit the Web:

When the telephone arrived in American homes and businesses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was some uncertainty over how people would use it and how using it would change their lives. Some social critics worried that the telephone’s insistent intrusions would undermine the status of the home as a refuge from the world’s pressures. Others feared that the phone would erode the shared public space of our communities and disengage us from social life. Telephone conversations were neither private nor trusted. Party lines and operators meant conversations were likely to be overheard; con artists took advantage of the new technology to prey on the naive.

The Web is still a new technology, and its complexity, breadth, and ubiquity have raised some important questions about security, as well as about its social, political, and economic effects. The participatory nature of the Web is one of many areas where both critics and proponents of activities like blogging have had a lot to say. The consensus on both sides, however, is that blogs could change, and in part have already changed, the way we read, the way we interact, and, ultimately, the way we think.

One reason for this is that blogs, as Rosenberg notes, manage to successfully incorporate the interactive, two-way communication model of the telephone while also relying on some of the visual and spectacular elements familiar in television. On the book’s official website, Rosenberg notes that

Before blogs, it was easy to believe that the Web would grow up to be a clickable TV — slick, passive, mass-market. Instead, blogging brought the Web’s native character into focus — convivial, expressive, democratic. Far from being pajama-clad loners, bloggers have become the curators of our collective experience, testing out their ideas in front of a crowd and linking people in ways that broadcasts can’t match.

The end result of this is that

we can now see that collectively [blogs] constitute something unprecedented in human history: a new kind of public sphere, at once ephemeral and timeless, sharing the characteristics of conversation and deliberation. Blogging allows us to think out loud together. Now that we have begun, it’s impossible to imagine stopping.

Rosenberg has also taken advantage of the interactivity made possible by the Web in another way: by compiling and hyperlinking the book’s endnotes on the official website for your perusal.

Rosenberg has his own blog at wordyard.com.

Codex Sinaiticus

If you haven’t already, check out the wonderful digital publication of the Codex Sinaiticus, a manuscript of the Christian bible dating from the fourth century. Its online incarnation includes an incredibly detailed scholarly apparatus divided into five primary activities:

• historical research
• conservation
• digitisation
• transcription
• dissemination

The process of translating the physical properties of the manuscript into digital display is documented not only through imaging standards and transcription policies, but also with a really interesting account of conservation analysis, nicely supplemented with photographs and charts. The interface is also really cool; when looking at manuscript pages, users can control what exactly gets displayed. Display options include image, translation, transcription, and physical description, and the interface changes depending on the options selected.