William Blake’s Universe feels a little hugger-mugger, as if part of its job is to offer up its secrets to like-minded enthusiasts.
William Blake
Posted inOpinion
William Blake, Our Contemporary
Tate Britain did wisely to rehang the British poet and painter closer to modernity.
Posted inArt
Dante: Our Medieval Contemporary
Why is Dante the Florentine still present with us 700 years after his death?
Posted inArt
The Tumultuous Times of William Blake
Blake was received by his contemporaries as either extremely odd or completely mad or perhaps both.
Posted inArt
In One of William Blake’s Final Works, the Engraved Trials of an Unfortunate Soul
One of the last series William Blake completed was on the woes of Job, that biblical figure tormented through a bet between God and Satan that his faith was tenuous
Posted inArt
How One Regional Craft Museum Is Expanding Its Horizons
LOUISVILLE, Kentucky — The Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft in Louisville has spent the last couple of years staking out a place in discussions occurring in contemporary art circles about the line dividing art and craft. The recent exhibition PRESS: Artist and Machine was a romantic show focused on illuminating the relationship between 19th-century printing-press technology and 20th- and 21st-century art production.
Posted inNews
Sleeping to Dream
Lucid dreaming — in which the dreamer becomes aware she is dreaming and can actively participate in and alter the narrative — has long been a source of fantastical imagery for artists, Salvador Dali being the most famous.
Posted inArt
Making a Heaven in Hell: The Angel of the Odd’s Dark Romanticism
PARIS — With the bloody revolutions of the late 1700s, the mood in Europe was apprehensive and brooding about the future. Perhaps then it’s no surprise that the art from that time has a certain gloominess to it as well. Yet what is unexpected is the strange beauty certain artists began to give their visions of horror, whether it was embracing the devil in the same way Milton did in Paradise Lost as an alluring prince of darkness, or portraying the apocalypse with a light that was inverted to our world, but curiously enticing. It’s this deviant use of beauty that is celebrated in L’Ange du Bizarre (The Angel of the Odd), an exhibition draped over the galleries of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris that beckons with its Dark Romanticism.
Posted inNews
Library Discovers Hundreds of Hidden William Blake Engravings in Its Collection
Last week, a library in Manchester announced an incredible find: the institution holds hundreds of engravings by poet and artist William Blake that it didn’t know it had.
