William Blake At The Petit Palais

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May happens to be the 200th anniversary of that unmitigated failure of a one-man show, which pushed the artist into the withdrawn state of his later years, and set him on the way to almost a century of oblivion.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”.

Lots of Kandinsky

After a winter that saw people staying up all night to visit Picasso and the Masters at the Grand Palais, the Andy Warhol show at the same site is such a hit that they are planning 24-hour opening to cope with the crowds. De Chirico is packing them in at the Paris City Modern Art Museum. The Pompidou Centre has scored a smash with a mega-show of Kandinsky. William Blake is drawing crowds at the Petit Palais.

Your editor only had two days in Paris and, for the first, he chose the retrospective exhibition of the Russian/German/French painter Vassily Kandinsky at the Pompidou. Just a word about this – at the time – ultra-modern structure: it is all glass and pipes, huge pipes, large pipes and small pipes. The show is on the top floor and can only be reached by a series of escalators, which convey the visitors high above the peaked roofs of Paris –unsettling for any one afraid of heights, like me.

The artist peers out from a giant photo over the vast hall, welcoming visitors with an impassive gaze to the largest retrospective in two decades years of this nomadic Russian painter's vibrant, ecstatic and groundbreaking art.

The more than 90 works on display here trace Kandinsky's course through three wars, three marriages and three countries - Russia, Germany and France, where he died in exile at the end of World War II.

The powerful colours and fast-moving forms hanging on stark white walls of the Centre Pompidou belie the prim bearing of the son of a 19th century well-to-do Moscow merchant whose artistic journey into abstraction helped pioneer a new kind of painting.
The exhibition is itself an exceptional venture, drawing from the three largest public Kandinsky collections, owned by the Centre Pompidou, the Guggenheim Museum of New York and the Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus of Munich.

The exhibition, already shown in Munich and travelling to New York in September, features figurative works starting in 1903 to his final painting, in 1942, Delicate Tensions, on loan from a private collection, with pale colours that reflect the ebbing of life. Together, they show that despite the visual fantasy there was nothing fanciful about this former law student's art work. Rather it evolved like a mathematical formula fed by inspiration.

In 1911, he and German painter Franz Marc created Blaue Reiter, or Blue Rider, an avant-garde movement which linked painting with music but was forced to an end as World War I erupted. However, horses, already featured in Kandinsky's earlier works, became significant if mysterious figures, sometimes used to depict flashes of movement.

Kandinsky didn't paint much during the First World War years, but in 1921 he was asked to join the staff of the forward-looking Bauhaus art school in Germany, and the chance to teach turned his creative asked lights up again. His theories about pure form and color became student exercises; this was when he started painting his signature hard-edged abstracts: bright, lighthearted, with their own internal logic. Black lines, now severely clear-cut, are a skeleton for vividly colored shapes on a pale background. New motifs appear: jagged saw teeth, rainbows, triangles, circles. Though none of these canvases have subjects, pictograms float through them — sometimes recognizable boats, creating structure with their masts and spars.
The writing on the walls told me that for Kandinsky, who actually studied the cells of mice for his art, "there is an infinitely large world and an infinitely small one.” After working with geometric shapes, he looked to "transcend geometry" with other forms.

In some paintings in his German years, often square, there seems to be neither a top nor a bottom.

Kandinsky died in France in 1944 at age 78. The Centre Pompidou acquired many of his works through Kandinsky's widow and third wife Nina.

Although there was no standing in line, the show was well attended, particularly by serious and rapt young Parisians and on the way down the escalators was worse than the way up.