And it goes on and on - summer in the underground

Week two - Summer school continues

and the little ones also have produced wonders

Summer in the underground

We only have one of ours in at the moment (where are you Fionn?!).....but this one is not anyone,










It is a "slightly" impressive progress for the first week of summer Mr. Munnion!
I feel sorry for the Slade staff this year....
More to come next week.

Fluxus

Joseph Beuys
[title not known] 1963
Fluxus-Namensliste

Collage, ink and pencil on paper
support: 620 x 218 mm frame: 761 x 544 x 28 mm
on paper, unique


Fluxus
An international avant-garde group or collective founded and given its name in 1960 by the Lithuanian/American artist George Maciunas; originally for an eponymous magazine featuring the work of a group of artists and composers centred around John Cage. The Latin name means flowing. In English a flux is a flowing out. Maciunas said that the purpose of Fluxus was to 'promote a revolutionary flood and tide in art, promote living art, anti-art'. This has strong echoes of Dada with which Fluxus had much in common. The group coalesced on the continent, first in Germany where Maciunas worked for the US Army. Fluxus subsequently staged a series of festivals in Paris, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, London and New York at which activities included concerts of avant-garde music and performances often spilling out into the street. Almost every avant-garde artist of the time took part in Fluxus, such as Joseph Beuys, Dick Higgins, Alice Hutchins, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Ben Vautier, Robert Watts, Emmett Williams, and it played an important part in the opening up of definitions of what art can be that led to the intense and fruitful pluralism seen in art since the 1960s (see eg Conceptual art, Performance art, Film & Video art, Postmodernism). Its heyday was the 1960s but it still continues.


Fluxus was a network of international artists who collaborated in Europe, the United States and Japan from the 1960s to 1970s. This display focuses on its collective manifestations, through concerts, festivals and publications.

Characterised as being both in flux and between media, Fluxus began as an innovative series of concerts organised in 1962 by George Maciunas, a Lithuanian-born American graphic designer and architect. These Zen-like performances, influenced by experimental music and concrete poetry, developed into extended festivals and group activities, such as FluxSports and even a FluxMass. From simple events to collective games, Fluxus performances stress the interaction between the material and the intellectual, the private and the social. The event structure becomes a vehicle for playfulness, humour and open-ended speculation.

Fluxus set itself in opposition to the prevailing social, cultural and artistic climate, especially the seriousness of Abstract Expressionism. It developed a distinct political stance, bypassing the museum system through film, performance and publishing. As early as 1961, Maciunas had collaborated with the composer La Monte Young on an interactive book, An Anthology. From that period onwards, publications ranged from collective anthologies such as Fluxus 1 and the Fluxus newspaper V TRE to Fluxboxes, Fluxkits or the collected works of individual artists, which were intended to be open-ended.

Openness and the dissolution of boundaries between traditional art forms was key to Fluxus, which had a profound impact on the arts of its period and on subsequent generations, from the development of artists’ books, Minimalism and Conceptual art, to performance, music, film and video art.

Joseph Beuys

Joseph Beuys born 1921 [- 1986]
German sculptor, draughtsman, creator of action-performances, political leader and teacher. Born at Krefeld, but spent most of his early life in or near Kleve. In the Luftwaffe 1940-5, part of the time as dive-bomber pilot. Shot down over the Crimea in a snowstorm in 1943, badly wounded and looked after for some days by Tartars. Began to make watercolours and drawings of a highly individual kind. Studied 1947-51 at the Dusseldorf Academy under the sculptor Matar-23. His interest in Rudolf Steiner, Christianity, mythology, botany and zoology led him to evolve a rich and complex symbolism, including archetypal animal images of hares, sheep, swans, bees, etc. First one-man exhibition at the St-28dtisches Museum Haus Koekkoek, Kleve, 1961. Moved from Kleve to D-4sseldorf in 1961 and became professor of sculpture at D-4sseldorf Academy. Participated in the Fluxus movement from 1962 and started in 1963 to give action-performances using such elements as dead hares, fat and felt. Founded the Deutschen Studentenpartei als Metapartei in 1967 and the Organisation f-4r direkte Demokratie durch Volksabstimmung (freie Volksiniative e.V.) 1971, and expounded their principles in discourse-discussions. Conflicts with authority over his teaching methods culminated in 1972 in his dismissal from the D-4sseldorf Academy by the Minister of Science, followed by a strike of his students and widespread protests. Lives in D-4sseldorf.


The Table 1952

Pencil, watercolour and stamp on paper
support: 209 x 297 mm frame: 674 x 540 x 29 mm
on paper, unique

Published in:
Ronald Alley, Catalogue of the Tate Gallery's Collection of Modern Art other than Works by British Artists, Tate Gallery and Sotheby Parke-Bernet, London 1981, pp.51-2

Things to see about street art

http://www.faile.net/site/
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/streetart/
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/streetart/interactive/index_bb.html
http://kids.tate.org.uk/games/street-art/


Blu

Based in Bologna, Italy, Blu makes very large-scale images of monsters and figures, often involved in scenes of barbarity. These have the look of cartoon creatures, or characters from Greek mythology. Drawing is integral to his work. He uses a very limited palette, which has the effect of highlighting his fascination with line and form. 'I use paint just to fill in the drawing,' he has said.

Blu sees buildings as 'sheets of paper' to sketch on. Due to their massive scale, his works often give the impression that the buildings they're painted on aren't quite big enough. What is unique about his work is his ability to doodle in a seemingly casual way on an epic scale. In terms of production, the work happens in two stages: first, he draws images in his sketch book but when he comes to working on the walls he often improvises something completely new.

His influences include underground and independent comic-book artists such as Robert Crumb, but he is also inspired by the fresco tradition of his native Italy and though it is quite removed from his practice, by the work of Gordon Matta-Clark. As Blu puts it: 'The way Matta-Clark used the building as a sculpture; it's something I try to imitate when I paint.'

www.blublu.org

Kurt Schwitters

Hello everybody,
It has been awhile, and I am sorry for the lack of updates recently, but here is some info on a very relevant artist to support the current GCSE printmaking and collage project. (text taken from Tate Online)

Kurt Schwitters 1887-1948

German painter, sculptor, typographer and writer. Born in Hanover. Studied at the School of Arts and Crafts in Hanover 1908-9 and at Dresden Academy 1909-14. Influenced by Expressionism and Cubism 1917-18. In 1918 created his own form of Dada in Hanover called 'Merz', using rubbish materials such as labels, bus tickets and bits of broken wood in his collages and constructions. Friendship with Arp, Hausmann and van Doesburg. Published the first edition of Anna Blume (a collection of poems and prose pieces) in 1919 and the magazine Merz 1923-32. First one-man exhibition at the Galerie Der Sturm, Berlin, 1920. Began in 1923 to build fantastic Merz constructions in his house in Hanover (the first 'Merzbau'). Spent the summers in Norway from 1931 and emigrated in 1937 to Lysaker near Oslo. Fled to England in 1940, spent seventeen months in internment camps, then lived 1941-5 in London. Moved in 1945 to Ambleside in the Lake District. In the last months of his life, he began a further Merz construction in an old barn at Langdale. Died at Kendal.





(Relief in Relief) circa 1942-5

Oil on wood and plaster
object: 495 x 413 x 102 mm
relief



Initially associated with the irreverent Dada movement in 1920s Germany, Schwitters developed an interest in collage and the complex visual inventions this technique made possible. He coined the term MERZ to describe his highly idiosyncratic approach to making art. Schwitters stayed true to these principles even when he left Germany after the rise of National Socialism and emigrated to Britain. He often took months over his constructions, painstakingly searching for the appropriate elements. In wartime Barnes, where glossy magazines for his collages were scarce, the artist used driftwood from the Thames.




The Autumn Crocus 1926-8, reconstructed 1958
Die Herbstzeitlose

Painted concrete
object: 806 x 298 x 305 mm
sculpture

Transferred from the Victoria & Albert Museum 1983

T03766
In the 1920s, when the first version of this sculpture was made, Schwitters was exploring ways of combining geometric forms with more fluid, organic shapes. The sculpture twists upwards, suggesting the 'half spiral' that he identified as 'the most important of my forms'. This replica was made to stand as Schwitters' gravestone in Ambleside, in the Lake District, but the local vicar refused to have it erected. The title is a piece of wordplay. It identifies a favourite flower, but also one who 'does not live to enjoy the autumn of his days.'





Picture of Spatial Growths - Picture with Two Small Dogs 1920-39
Bild mit Raumgewächsen-Bild mit 2 kleinen Hunden

Mixed media collage on board
frame: 1155 x 863 x 131 mm support: 970 x 690 x 110 mm

This assemblage of discarded rubbish and printed ephemera was begun in Germany in 1920. In 1937, Schwitters fled Nazi Germany and went to Norway, where he added layers of Norwegian material: theatre tickets, receipts, newspaper cuttings, scraps of lace, and a box with two china dogs. The different layers of collage reflect the artist's journey into exile. Schwitters coined the term Merz to describe this form of art, which arranges the detritus of urban civilization in a highly ordered composition.
(From the display caption August 2004)


The Proposal 1942
Die Brautwerbung

Collage
support: 319 x 395 mm
on paper, unique

Accepted by H.M. Government in lieu of Inheritance Tax and allocated to Tate 2007

T12398
The Proposal takes its title from the nineteenth century lithographic illustration over which Schwitters pasted sections of a magazine advertisement. The high colour of the advertisement is set against the monochrome of the print. A conflict between a brash contemporary society and nineteenth-century restraint seems to be suggested. In other similar works Schwitters makes it clear that the contemporary vision being referred to is modern America. Knowing that Schwitters was an exile in wartime London when he conceived this image of prosperity makes it all the more poignant.

Year 8 Sculpture project

Year 8 has been working with cardboard and clay to produce sculptures of objects following a building process that is inspired on the work of Naum Gabo (see Naum Gabo post). Here are some examples of the sculptures and the beautiful watercolours they are also creating using Morandi as an inspiration.

On the 9th of March, early in the morning, this year 8 class dived into this task with admirable skill and concentration. More than admirable, it was, so far, never seen. Well done year 8!

Dieter Roth

(press title to visit MOMA'a site on the artist)

Between 1947 and 1998, Dieter Roth made 524 prints, culminating in one of the richest and most diverse printmaking oeuvres ever. Many are unique prints, created by the inventive manipulation of the various stages in the printmaking process, achieving remarkable editions in which not one print is identical.

The artist used all known—and some newly invented—printmaking techniques including woodcuts (relief printing), etching, engraving, aquatint (intaglio printing), lithography, offset (planographic printing), screenprinting (stencil printing), pressings (objects flattened by vertically exerted pressure), and squashings (objects flattened by horizontally exerted pressure). Often various methods were combined.

Roth’s creativity and ingenuity pushed printmaking beyond all known borders.


Dieter Roth, Small Sunset, 1972, TL37865.2. Photography: Heini Schneebeli © Dieter Roth Foundation, Hamburg

"I hate it if I notice that I like something, if I am able to do something, so that I just have to repeat it, that it could become a habit. Then I stop immediately. Also if it threatens to become beautiful."

Dieter Roth was a sculptor, poet, graphic designer, performer, publisher, musician, and, most of all, provocateur. Born to a Swiss father and German mother in Hanover, Germany, in 1930, he was sent out of Nazi Germany to live in Switzerland with foster parents. He received his training in graphic design in Bern, where he also became interested in avant-garde design and poetry, publishing some of his work in Daniel Spoerri’s magazine material.

(article from Harvard University Musem - http://www.artmuseums.harvard.edu/exhibitions/featured/eatart/roth.html)


Dieter Roth
New Year's Gift
1954
line etching on parchment, ca. 30 x 21 in.
Published by F. Gygi, Bern, 1955
Photo by Heini Schneebeli


Dieter ROTH
Pain and Sorrow, 1972 (Dobke 262)
Lithography
65 x 93 cm

Suprematism

"Suprematism is the rediscovery of pure art that, in the course of time,
had become obscured by the accumulation of 'things'."
- Kasimir Malevich, The Non-Objective World


Suprematism

The name given by the Russian artist Kasimir Malevich to the abstract art he developed from 1913. The first actual exhibition of Suprematist paintings was in December 1915 in St Petersburg, at an exhibition called O.10. The exhibition included thirty-five abstract paintings by Malevich, among them the famous black square on a white ground (Russian Museum, St Petersburg) which headed the list of his works in the catalogue. In 1927 Malevich published his book The Non-Objective World, one of the most important theoretical documents of abstract art. In it he wrote: 'In the year 1913, trying desperately to free art from the dead weight of the real world, I took refuge in the form of the square.' Out of the 'Suprematist square' as he called it, Malevich developed a whole range of forms including rectangles, triangles and circles often in intense and beautiful colours. These forms are floated against a usually white ground, and the feeling of colour in space in Suprematist painting is a crucial aspect of it. Suprematism was one of the key movements of modern art in Russia and was particularly closely associated with the Revolution. After the rise of Stalin from 1924 and the imposition of Socialist Realism, Malevich's career languished. In his last years before his death in 1935 he painted realist pictures. In 1919 the Russian artist El Lissitsky met Malevich and was strongly influenced by Suprematism, as was the Hungarian born Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.


Malevich - Dynamic Suprematism 1915 or 1916
Supremus


Laszlo Moholy-Nagy 1895-1946 - K VII 1922


El Lissitzky 1890-1941 - 5. Globetrotter (in Time) 1923
Globetrotter (in der Zeit)

(From Tate Modern Online)

Constructivism

Constructivism: (1913 - 1930)

Founded in 1913 by Vladimir Tatlin, the Russian Constructivist movement developed from Cubism, Italian Futurism, and Suprematism in Russia, Neo Plasticism in Holland, and the Bauhaus School in Germany. The term Constructivism is used to define non-representational relief construction, sculpture, kinetics, and painting. As a response to changes in technology and contemporary life, it advocated a change in the art scene, aiming to create a new order in art and architecture that referenced social and economic problems. Brothers Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner also supported the movement, infusing sculptural elements from cubism and futurism with an allusion to architecture, machinery, and technology. The movement’s first Constructivist manifesto was written in 1921 when the First Working Group of Constructivists was formed in Moscow. The movement later spread to Holland and Germany before gaining international popularity. The style was initially supported by the Soviet Regime, but later was deemed unsuitable for mass propaganda reasons. Following this decree, Gabo and Pevsner went into exile while Tatlin stayed in Russia.

Tatlin's Tower. Model of the Monument to the Third International (never built).


The Constructivist movement was also prominent in theatrical scene design, mostly spread by the efforts of Vsevolod Meyerhold.

Constructivism was one the first movements to adopt a strictly non-objective subject matter. The movement’s work was mainly geometric and precisely composed, sometimes through mathematics and measuring tools. They favored the basic shapes of squares, rectangles, circles and triangles. Constructivists used an array of materials including wood, celluloid, nylon, plexi-glass, tin, cardboard, and wire welded or glued together. Later in the development, Constructivists incorporated aluminum, electronics, and chrome. In using these forms and materials, their aim was to depict the dominance of the machine in the modern world and its triumph over nature.


Maquette of a Monument Symbolising the Liberation of the Spirit 1952
Antoine Pevsner 1884-1962


Naum Gabo. 1950. Linear construction No. 2 (Variation No. 1). Perspex with nylon monofilament

Francesco Clemente

Fire
1982
Watercolor on Arches paper

"Virgine", 1995, Pastel on Paper

(Biography taken from the Guggenheim Museum of New York)

Francesco Clemente was born on March 23, 1952, in Naples, into a family with aristocratic roots. After writing poetry and painting as a child, he went to Rome to study architecture at the Universit� degli Studi di Roma, La Sapienza in 1970. Leaving school before completing the program, he focused instead on art.

Although he came of age when Arte Povera and Conceptual art were in vogue, Clemente concentrated on representation in works on paper. His first solo exhibition was at the Galleria Valle Giulia in Rome in 1971. After meeting Alighiero e Boetti in Rome in 1972, Clemente traveled with the artist in Afghanistan. In 1973, Clemente first visited India, a country to which he would return again and again, often summering there. In 1974, he met Alba Primiceri, a theater actor, whom he would later marry; she would become a frequent subject of his art. In 1976 and 1977, Clemente spent time at Madras's Theosophical Society, where he delved into its library of religious and spiritual texts. His interest in Hindu spiritual life and in other non-European cultures was combined with an enthusiasm for local popular culture and crafts. Clemente began collaborating with Indian sign painters, miniaturists, and papermakers, as in Francesco Clemente Pinxit, a 1980–81 series of miniatures in gouache on handmade paper, for which young miniaturists from Jaipur and Orissa painted the decorative elements.

He continued making drawings and other works on paper in the 1970s, pursuing what would become his signature subjects: the human form, particularly women's bodies; his own image; sexuality; myth and spirituality; non-Western symbols; and dreamlike visions. Clemente's participation in the 1980 Venice Biennale brought him international attention. He rapidly became seen as one of the leaders of the �return to figuration,� dubbed the Transavanguardia in Italy (by art critic Achille Bonito Oliva) and Neo-Expressionism [more] in the United States, though Clemente himself was uncomfortable with such labels. This acclaim coincided with Clemente's move to a New York loft with his growing family. In 1981, he studied Sanskrit in New York.

In 1981–82, Clemente created his first large oils, a series of twelve paintings titled The Fourteen Stations, which were shown at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London in 1983. The following year, he collaborated with Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat on a group of works. While Clemente was working on a large scale, he simultaneously developed various book projects, including three unique works created with Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. In the 1980s, Clemente continued to travel to India; he also sojourned in southern Italy and the American Southwest. In the 1990s, he added Jamaica to his list of favorite spots and began working in a studio in New Mexico. He used a wax fresco method known as cera punica around this time. During a 1995 trip to Mount Abu in the Himalayas, Clemente painted a watercolor a day for fifty-one days in between taking walks and meditating.

Among Clemente's less traditional undertakings have been murals for the now-demolished Palladium nightclub in New York (1985) and a mural and lampshades for New York's Hudson hotel, which opened in 2000. In addition, he produced some two hundred works for director Alfonso Cuar�n's film Great Expectations (1998).

Clemente's art has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions. The first major American traveling show of his art was organized by the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida (1986). Retrospectives have been organized by the Sezon Museum of Art in Tokyo (1994) and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1999). Clemente continues to divide his time between New York, Madras, and Rome.


Creation date 1986
Materials lithograph on Okawara Kozo paper
Credit line RCA Collection



"PAINTINGS", GAGOSIAN GALLERY MAY 9th 2003

William Blake

William Elohim Creating Adam (detail) 1795



Songs of Innocence, Copy F, pl.1, Frontispiece (1789) © Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

William Blake was born on November 28, 1757 in London at 28 Broad Street, Golden Square, where his father had a successful hosiery business. Since Blake was an unruly child his parents educated him at home instead of formal school. He spent his youth roaming about London and the countryside on the edge of town. He describes this in a song from his Poetical Sketches which he started writing at the age of thirteen:

How sweet I roamed from field to field
And tasted all the summer's pride

At the age of about ten, Blake said that he saw his 'first vision' when, sauntering along on Peckham Rye, he looked up to see a tree filled with angels. According to the accounts Blake gave of his literary development, he was already reading the works of Milton and Isaiah as a child.


Joseph of Arimathea Among the Rocks of Albion (1773)
© Fitzwilliam Museum

At the age of ten, Blake was sent to Mr Pars' drawing school in the Strand, where he copied plaster-casts of ancient sculptures. His father, unable to afford the cost of placing Blake as the pupil of a leading painter, took the prudent decision to apprentice him to an engraver at the age of fourteen. Blake's master, James Basire of Queen Street, Lincoln's Inn, was engraver to the London Society of Antiquaries. As a result, Blake was sent to Westminster Abbey to make drawings of tombs and monuments. Here he learned to love gothic art. He stood on the tombs to view them better and even made sketches when the grave of Edward I was opened.

In his free time, Blake collected prints of then unfashionable artists such as Durer, Raphael, and Michelangelo. In literature too, he rejected eighteenth-century polish, preferring the Elizabethans (Shakespeare, Jonson and Spenser) and ancient ballads, both authentic (such as Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry), and forged (such as Macpherson's Ossian and Chatterton's Poems of Rowley).



The Penance of Jane Shore(c. 1793) © Tate

In August 1779, Blake was admitted to the Royal Academy (founded by the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds who was then its president). Paying his way by producing engravings for novels and catalogues, Blake drew from casts, life models and corpses, and shared in the dream of founding a new English school of historical painting.

There was, however, friction between Blake and his teachers. Reynolds recommended that he work with 'less extravagance and more simplicity', while George Michael Moser, another teacher there, discouraged Blake's admiration for the 'old, hard, stiff and dry unfinished works' of Raphael and Michelangelo. On the other hand, Blake was inspired by the artist James Barry and his grand historical paintings. He made friends with other young artists and was able to exhibit his own historical watercolours.

Blake married Catherine Boucher at St Mary's, Battersea in 1782. The newly-weds then moved out of Blake's father's house to Green Street, near Leicester Square. In the next year Blake's Poetical Sketches were published, and there was even talk of raising a subscription to send him to study in Rome.
n the summer of 1784, Blake's father died. While the eldest son, James, took over the hosiery business in number 28, Blake and his wife moved into the next-door house at 27 Broad Street. There he set up in business as a print seller in partnership with James Parker. The partnership lasted only three years, and in 1787 Blake moved to a house around the corner in Poland Street. In the same year his beloved younger brother, Robert, died. Blake sat by him during his last illness, and claimed to see his spirit pass through the ceiling on its way to heaven.

Blake said that the spirit of Robert came to him 'in a vision in the night' and revealed the secret technique for combining poem and picture on a single printing plate. In 1788, Blake started work on the first of his illuminated books using this method. His first efforts were in simple, chapbook style, but by 1789, The Songs of Innocence had been completed with Blake and his wife hand-producing the book. In the words of Blake's first biographer Alexander Gilchrist, they did everything 'except manufacturing the paper'.


Europe Title-page (1794)
© Glasgow University Library


Lambeth was still a village when Blake and his wife moved to No. 13 Hercules Buildings in 1791. A much larger house than any Blake had lived in before, it provided the light and space that he needed for his work. Blake now entered upon the most creative and productive period of his life.

Blake's work had become more overtly political after the upheavals in France in 1789. His poem The French Revolution, though printed in 1791 by Joseph Johnson (publisher of Tom Paine's Rights of Man), was deemed too dangerous to actually publish. By this time, Blake already felt himself to be losing out to his contemporaries in the art world, and now he saw the door to public recognition closing. The 1793 co-publication of The Gates of Paradise, an emblem book for children, was Blake's last venture into commercial publishing. In October of the same year, Blake published his Prospectus a public advertisement of his recent works. The Prospectus was also a critique of the establishment and the difficulty of gaining reconition for artists who lacked 'the means to propagate such works as have wholly absorbed the Man of Genius'. Blake was literally taking matters into his own hands by producing his own work and offering it for sale at his home.

The Prospectus advertised the illuminated prophetic books which had begun to pour forth from his press: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a brief epic interspersed with proverbs, The Visions of the Daughters of Albion, an allegory about freedom, and America, A Prophecy, a mixture of history and myth, all date from 1793.

There was no letting up in 1794, when The Songs of Experience (the pessimistic 'contrary' volume to The Songs of Innocence) was completed. In the same year Blake also published Europe, A Prophecy (an allegory of the political situation in Europe with warnings about the dire consequences of war), and The First Book of Urizen (his account of the origins of mankind and the natural world).

The House of Death (c.1795) © Tate

The illustrations in Blake's Prophetic Books had been growing ever larger and more colourful. It was therefore a logical step for him to adapt his printing-methods to produce full-scale paintings. The year 1795 saw the production of the series of twelve large watercolour prints, including Newton and Nebuchadnezzar and The House of Death (shown here), which biographer Peter Ackroyd calls 'the finest artistic statement of Blake's Lambeth visions'.

In 1796, Richard Edwards, a bookseller, commissioned Blake to illustrate Young's Night Thoughts, a philosophical verse epic immensely popular in the late eighteenth century. Ultimately, however, Edwards lost interest, and finally less than half the poem was published, with only forty-three engravings from Blake's 500 watercolours. Blake's friend, the sculptor John Flaxman, commissioned him to illustrate the poems of Thomas Gray. In addition, Blake's most important patron the civil servant Thomas Butts, commissioned a series of Biblical paintings from him. However, this work was not enough to compensate for price inflation and the depressed art market, caused by the war with France.

Work was scarce and life was hard, so it seemed like a stroke of luck when William Hayley, an eccentric gentleman poet, invited Blake down to live on his estate in Sussex. The Blakes were glad to leave the 'terrible desert of London' for 'sweet Felpham'.

John Milton (1800-1803) © Manchester City Art Gallery

Delighted by the natural beauty around him, Blake embarked on his new life in Sussex with great optimism. Blake received many commissions from his new patron, producing plates for Hayley's ballad Little Tom the Sailor, and engravings for his Ballads on Anecdotes relating to Animals and for his Life of Cowper.

But by 1802, the situation had soured. Blake was tired of the endless stream of trivial commissions from Hayley and his society neighbours. He had no wish to waste his talents painting a series of great poets' portraits for Hayley's new library (see portrait of Milton above), or handscreens for his neighbour, Lady Bathurst. The next year Blake wrote a letter to his patron Butts stating that only in London that he could 'carry on his visionary studies...see visions, dream dreams'.

To make matters worse, in August 1803 Blake had driven a soldier, Private John Schofield, out of his garden, allegedly uttering the treasonous words 'Damn the king. The soldiers are all slaves.' Scheduled to be put on trial for sedition, Blake moved back to London in late 1803, thoroughly sick of his officious patron, of his damp cottage and of the law. He briefly returned to Sussex in early 1804 and was acquitted to the riotous approval of the court.
Blake's optimism about his return to London was ill-founded. At his new lodgings on the first floor of No. 17 South Moulton Street, he began work on the illuminated books, Milton and Jerusalem. However, commercial work proved even more elusive than it had before. 'Art in London flourishes,' he wrote, 'yet no one brings work to me'.

When the publisher Robert Cromek approached him to both illustrate and engrave the poet Robert Blair's Grave, Blake's luck seemed to have taken a turn for the better. The disappointment was only the more intense, therefore, when Cromek ultimately chose the artist Schiavonetti to engrave Blake's illustrations instead of Blake himself. The Grave proved a success, but Blake received little financial reward. He now became increasingly paranoid and cantankerous, breaking off from most of his friends and patrons.

In 1806, Cromek teamed up with the artist Thomas Stothard to produce a painting and engraving of Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims. Blake claimed they had stolen the idea from him and when Stothard's work was exhibited to great acclaim, Blake decided to hold a one-man exhibition centered around his own version of the Canterbury Pilgrims. Unfortunately, he could not afford to show his work in a fashionable part of town, so his exhibition was held in his brother's hosiery shop in May 1809. Almost no one came. The reviews were cruel, mocking Blake as 'an unfortunate lunatic whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement', and dismissing his Descriptive Catalogue as 'a farrago of nonsense...and egregious vanity'.

By 1810, Blake was impoverished and estranged from his friends and patrons. Indeed his first biographer entitled the chapter dealing with the period 1810-1817 'Years of Deepening Neglect'. But Blake continued to work, believing his Jerusalem, an epic about war, peace and liberty focused on London, to be his finest work.
As Blake turned sixty, his work at last began to find passionate admirers among younger artists, such as the watercolourists John Linnell and John Varley. It was Varley who encouraged Blake to draw sketches of his 'spiritual visitants', of which the most famous is The Ghost of a Flea. Linnell, meanwhile, despite being over thirty years Blake's junior, commissioned works for himself, and helped Blake secure commissions from others. It was thanks to his influence that Blake made the woodcuts for Robert Thornton's schooltext of Virgil's Pastorals in 1821. And Linnell himself ordered a duplicate set of the watercolours of The Book of Job (originally produced for Thomas Butts) and commissioned the series of drawings from Dante's Divine Comedy in 1824.

In 1821, Blake moved to a couple of rooms in Fountain Court, Strand, from which he could see the Thames. His young admirers called him 'The Interpreter', and confident in the judgement of posterity, he grew into a gentler and less angry man.

In the spring of 1827, Blake fell ill. A friend at his deathbed said he died 'singing of the things he saw in heaven' on August 12 at the age of sixty-nine. He was buried in an unmarked grave in the dissenters' graveyard at Bunhill Fields. One of his last acts had been to draw a picture of Catherine, his loyal wife and helpmate, from his deathbed.

press the title of this post to view the William Blake online archive