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Blake in Paris

The first exhibition in France devoted to William Blake since 1947 will open at the Petit Palais on 1 April 2009 and run to 28 June. Curated by Michael Phillips, it will be composed of more than 150 works and represent Blake as a poet, painter, and artist-printmaker. The accompanying catalogue, in addition to listing the works, will also include over twenty essays by John Barrell, Martin Butlin, Elizabeth Denlinger, Anthony Dyson, Peter France, David Fuller, Suzanne Hoover, Andrew Lincoln, Saree Makdisi, Jon Mee, Martin Myrone, Morton Paley, Martin Postle, and Jon Stallworthy, amongst others. A conference is being planned to take place at the Collège de France, and a program of lectures in both French and English is being organized by UFR d’Études Anglophones, Université Paris-Diderot (Paris 7).

Robert N. Essick

The Huntington Library recently published a color reproduction of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience copy E. I served as the volume’s editor and provided a commentary on the poems and designs. In the “Acknowledgments” (177), I state that “we show the images on a background based on the original paper.” In spite of the production team’s best efforts, the paper color in the reproduction does not accurately represent Blake’s paper. The reproduction is too brown, with a slight rosy hue, whereas the original is much whiter, with a slight yellow-gray tint. The one exception is “The Tyger,” plate 40 in copy E. Because of overexposure to sunlight while on exhibition for many years, the paper has turned brown. The reproduction is accurate in this regard. The representation of Blake’s inks and watercolors on all plates is also true to the original.
The following sentence appears on page 12 of the commentary: “We can see outward evidence of such unities in play, a central activity in several Songs of Innocence, because of the way the state of innocence promotes a spontaneous marriage of thought and deed, mind and body.” The sentence should read as follows: “We can see outward evidence of such unities in childhood play, a central activity in several Songs of Innocence, because of the way play promotes a spontaneous marriage of thought and deed, mind and body.”

Project Blake

Matthew Couper, the director of Project Blake, which celebrates Blake's life in Lambeth, has kindly provided the following details of the project's initiatives:
A visual art and sound installation in Centaur Street, near where Blake lived in Lambeth.  This will include large scale mosaics of Blake's work and recordings of his poetry;
A community and education program;
The inaugural William Blake Festival at the Southbank Centre;
A theatre production based on the life of Blake.

Upcoming Reviews

Books, CDs, and exhibitions slated for review in the journal:

Craig Atwood. Community of the Cross: Moravian Piety in Colonial Bethlehem. Pennsylvania State UP, 2004.

David Bindman, with Darryl Pinckney. Mind-Forg'd Manacles: William Blake and Slavery. Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2007.

Blake's Shadow. Exhibition at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, January to April 2008.

Steve Clark and David Worrall, eds. Blake, Nation and Empire. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Steve Clark and Masashi Suzuki, eds. The Reception of Blake in the Orient. Continuum, 2006.

Glen Robert Gill. Northrop Frye and the Phenomenology of Myth. U of Toronto P, 2006.

Matthew J. A. Green. Visionary Materialism in the Early Works of William Blake: The Intersection of Enthusiasm and Empiricism. Palgrave, 2005.

Kevin Hutchings. Songs of William Blake. (CD) 2007.

Saree Makdisi. Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s. U of Chicago P, 2003.

Martin Myrone. The Blake Book. Tate Publishing, 2007.

Hatsuko Niimi. Blake's Dialogic Texts. Keio UP, 2006.

William Pressly. The Artist as Original Genius: Shakespeare's "Fine Frenzy" in Late Eighteenth-Century British Art. U of Delaware P, 2008.

Robert Rix. William Blake and the Cultures of Radical Christianity. Ashgate, 2007.

Christopher Rowland. "Wheels within Wheels": William Blake and the Ezekiel's Merkabah in Text and Image. Marquette UP, 2007.

Sheila Spector. "Glorious incomprehensible": The Development of Blake's Kabbalistic Language. Bucknell UP, 2001.

Jason Whittaker and David Worrall, eds. Blake, Modernity and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

William Blake: "I still go on / Till the Heavens and Earth are gone." Exhibition at Tate Britain, November 2007 to June 2008.

Nicholas M. Williams, ed. William Blake Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Julia Wright. Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation. Ohio UP, 2004.

If you would like to submit a Blake-related item for inclusion in this section, please contact Sarah Jones (sjns@mail.rochester.edu).

Last modified: Friday, 03-Oct-2008 15:10:25 EDT