William Blake’s Arrows of Desire.

After the ‘shock of the new and already seedy’ at the Pompidou, the William Blake show at the Petit Palais brought me back into lap of the familiar fin-de-siecle Parisian museums. The Grand and Petit Palais sit across from each other, the remnants of a World Exhibition, replete with now comic symbolic sculpture and gilt cast iron. Ah, the Frenchness of it all.
May I say here that the exteriors of the Alte und Neue Pinakothek in Munich are modest – the art is inside.

The William Blake show, perhaps appropriately, was in the basement below the opulence of the Beaux-arts objets that may have graced the salons of Madame Verdurin and the Duchesse de Guermantes.

At no time in his life was Blake a success as an artist or a poet. The show is subtitled as ‘The Visionary Genius of English Romanticism’ but the handout is a litany of failure – 1785: Blake submits paintings to the Royal Academy six times; 1789: his epic poem Tiriel is never printed; 1793: sale of illuminated books from his home sells 3 copies; 1809: one-man show brings in 6 visitors; 1822: the Royal Academy grants him 25 pounds because he is in ‘great distress’; 1827 death in his two-room apartment in London. Fame came posthumously thirty years after.
This May happens to be the 200th anniversary of that unmitigated failure of a one-man show, which pushed the artist into the withdrawn state of his later years, and set him on the way to almost a century of oblivion.

As the life, so the show. Visitors, - a lot more now than six - peer at book illustrations hung crowded together in small rooms. There are so many peerers that one has to stand in line to get a glimpse and one fears to linger.

But this gazing into his visual world of archetypes, with its symmetrical compositions, its strongly flat designs, its figures turned into geometrical shapes, its use of a cartoon language, brings revelations of genius.

There are more than 130 works on display including many of his celebrated water colours and prints: the Pity, Hecate, Newton and also his his illuminated books: Songs of Innocence and Experience, America a Prophesy, Europe a Prophesy, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Jerusalem.

We looked and marveled and left humming “Jerusalem”.