William Blake, Visionary, mystical, prophetic artist and poet

 

William Blake, (born Nov. 28, 1757, London, Eng.—died Aug. 12, 1827, London), English engraver, artist, poet, and visionary, author of exquisite lyrics in Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) and profound and difficult “prophecies,” such as Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), The First Book of Urizen (1794), Milton (1804[–?11]), and Jerusalem (1804[–?20]). The dating of Blake’s texts is explained in the Researcher’s Note: Blake publication dates. These works he etched, printed, coloured, stitched, and sold, with the assistance of his devoted wife, Catherine. Among his best known lyrics today are “The Lamb,” “The Tyger,” “London,” and the “Jerusalem” lyric from Milton, which has become a kind of second national anthem in Britain. In the early 21st century, Blake was regarded as the earliest and most original of the Romantic poets, but in his lifetime he was generally neglected or (unjustly) dismissed as mad.

Blake's The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with Sun (1805) is one of a series of illustrations of Revelation

Even the sun is raging, as dark clouds gather over guilty Cain. Finding of the body of Abel, as envisioned by William Blake,

Blake's Ancient of Days, 1794. The "Ancient of Days" is described in Chapter 7 of the Book of Daniel. This image depicts Copy D of the illustration currently held at the British Museum

Gloom. Despair. Agony. Illustration from America: A Prophecy in 1795 but very current sentiment as well. By William Blake, born on this day in 1757.

Blake's Newton (1795) demonstrates his opposition to the "single-vision" of scientific materialism: Newton fixes his eye on a compass (recalling Proverbs 8:27, an important passage for Milton) to write upon a scroll that seems to project from his own head.

William Blake grew up in modest circumstances and his mother was his teacher.  This he saw as a positive matter, later writing, “Thank God I never was sent to school/ To be Flogd into following the Style of a Fool.”

Visions were commonplaces to Blake, and his life and works were intensely spiritual. His friend the journalist Henry Crabb Robinson wrote that when Blake was four years old he saw God’s head appear in a window. While still a child he also saw the Prophet Ezekiel under a tree in the fields and had a vision, according to his first biographer, Alexander Gilchrist (1828–61), of “a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.” Robinson reported in his diary that Blake spoke of visions “in the ordinary unemphatic tone in which we speak of trivial matters.…Of the faculty of Vision he spoke as One he had had from early infancy—He thinks all men partake of it—but it is lost by not being cultiv[ate]d.” In his essay “A Vision of the Last Judgment,” Blake wrote: I assert for My Self that I do not behold the outward Creation… ‘What’ it will be Questiond ‘When the Sun rises, do you not See a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?’ O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying ‘Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty!’

His was truly revolutionary art, working against the backdrop of the social and political convulsions of the American and French Revolutions and the European wars which followed. In his particular and eccentric way, he projected the hopes and fears of his age.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Blake

https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/07/14/william-blake-john-trusler-letter/

Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec

 

Born on this day in 1864. Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec

November 24, 1864. Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa (24 November 1864 - 9 September 1901) was a French painter, printmaker, draughtsman, and illustrator, whose immersion in the colorful and theatrical life of fin de siècle Paris yielded an oeuvre of exciting, elegant and provocative images of the modern and sometimes decadent life of those times.

Toulouse-Lautrec's parents, the Comte and Comtesse, were first cousins (his grandmothers were sisters), and he suffered from congenital health conditions sometimes attributed to a family history of inbreeding.

Despite the fact that Toulouse-Lautrec worked in neighborhoods largely inhabited by the poor, the artist was wealthy. Born in Albi in 1864, Toulouse-Lautrec was raised in an upper middle-class family. (The extent of the family’s wealth is not entirely clear, though some of his relatives owned estates.) After his brother died, when Toulouse-Lautrec was eight years old, he went to live in Paris with his mother. By the time he was a teenager, he had begun to suffer from what may have been pycnodysostosis, a rare genetic condition; his growth was stunted, and the pain he experienced rendered him unable to do many physical activities. His attention subsequently turned to art.

At age 13, Toulouse-Lautrec fractured his right femur. At age 14, he fractured his left. The breaks did not heal properly. Modern physicians attribute this to an unknown genetic disorder, possibly pycnodysostosis (sometimes known as Toulouse-Lautrec Syndrome), or a variant disorder along the lines of osteopetrosis, achondroplasia, or osteogenesis imperfecta.  Rickets aggravated by praecox virilism has also been suggested. Afterwards, his legs ceased to grow, so that as an adult he was extremely short (1.42 m or 4 ft 8 in).  He developed an adult-sized torso, while retaining his child-sized legs.  Additionally, he is reported to have had hypertrophied genitals.

Physically unable to participate in many activities enjoyed by males his age, Toulouse-Lautrec immersed himself in art. He became an important Post-Impressionist painter, art nouveau illustrator, and lithographer, and, through his works, recorded many details of the late-19th-century bohemian lifestyle in Paris. Toulouse-Lautrec contributed a number of illustrations to the magazine Le Rire during the mid-1890s. 

In his less-than-20-year career, Toulouse-Lautrec created:

737 canvased paintings
275 watercolours
363 prints and posters
5,084 drawings
some ceramic and stained glass work
an unknown number of lost works

His debt to the Impressionists, particularly the more figurative painters like Manet and Degas, is apparent, for within his works, one can draw parallels to the detached barmaid at A Bar at the Folies-Bergère by Manet and the behind-the-scenes ballet dancers of Degas. His style was also influenced by the classical Japanese woodprints which became popular in art circles in Paris.

He excelled at depicting people in their working environments, with the colour and movement of the gaudy nightlife present but the glamour stripped away. He was a master at painting crowd scenes where each figure was highly individualized.

More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_de_Toulouse-Lautrec

Toulouse-Lautrec had his first exposure to Japanese prints in Paris as an eighteen-year-old student in 1882. A year later, after seeing the exhibition at Galerie Georges Petit, he was inspired to begin his own collection of Japanese art. 

His fascination with ukiyo-e prints and their subjects was mirrored in his own study of the denizens of Montmartre and the cafés, cabarets, bars, and brothels that he

frequented. To an even further extent than Degas, he saw these colorful people as his primary subjects. 

It was a purposeful choice for an artist who, like so many

others of his generation, was searching for new, modern, and unconventional ways of depicting the world.

Near the end of his short, painful but art-packed life, Toulouse-Lautrec remained under the spell of Japanese art and he yearned to travel to Japan to see firsthand the world from which he had learned so much. Instead, the critically ill artist had to settle for a vicarious experience by visiting

the Exposition Universelle of 1900, with its various pavilions featuring aspects of Japanese life and culture.

The image of a late 19th-century white male French painter often conjures a penniless genius, a tortured recluse, or some combination of the two. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was different from his contemporaries in that he was neither of these things. He became massively successful during his lifetime, unlike Vincent van Gogh, who sold only a fraction of his numerous paintings while he was alive. Toulouse-Lautrec was at the center of Paris’s vibrant arts scene, unlike Paul Gauguin, who fled the country for Polynesia, where he painted images of Tahitian women. Toulouse-Lautrec also did not craft images of nature en plein air, the way that Claude Monet did, nor he did not devote himself to still lifes free of people, the way that Paul Cézanne largely did.

All of this makes Toulouse-Lautrec, who died at just 36 years old in 1901, an eccentric figure and somewhat of an outlier among his peers. His art, which focused largely on bars and dance halls in Paris and the people who frequented them, looks quite unlike the landscapes his Impressionist and Post-Impressionist colleagues produced, and his bombastic sensibility often imbued his work with a theatricality that ran counter to the era’s dominating styles. And yet, Toulouse-Lautrec’s work continues to fascinate, partly because it provides such a clear window into life in late 19th-century France.

Both his rise and his fall were swift. In 1899, having drank heavily for years—“his days and nights were soaked in alcohol,” Museum of Modern Art curator Sarah Suzuki once wrote—his alcoholism began to bear out on his health; he may have also contracted syphilis, incurable then and for many decades. He died in 1901, merely a decade after his first commission for the Moulin Rouge. Although he lived to be just 36, his hard-partying persona has continued to intrigue. Hollywood filmmakers, for example, have not been able to resist his allure.

The lightness and mobility denied to Toulouse-Lautrec by his faulty legs emerged from his hand and his colorful, honest look at the harsh life of Parisian entertainers and the lower class fascinates us to this day. 

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/laut/hd_laut.htm

Other links:
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec at the Museum of Modern Art
Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre at the National Gallery of Art
Toulouse-Lautrec and Paris exhibition at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec – Artcyclopedia

Hard Truths by Jay Kuo

 

Hard Truths

How can we make sense of the nonsensical?

JAY KUO NOV 6

READ IN APP

If you’re like me, you’re still in a state of stunned disbelief. The election results feel absurd and counterfactual, and you want desperately to make sense of what just happened. 

This feeling perhaps is akin to watching a family member return to an abusive spouse, even after nearly being beaten to death. Or watching in horror as a loved one, whom you thought was finally clean, start using drugs again and spiral helplessly out of control. How could someone choose that over what we have to offer?

I admit a bit of trepidation in trying to address this topic on the day after this travesty, because I know how raw emotions are running, and any messenger is pretty much asking to be shot. But here’s a bit of where I am today.

One could almost excuse this nation for electing Trump the first time. There were millions of people willing to take a chance on a “business man” they knew from television. Roll the dice and see, why not? A foolhardy and costly mistake, but one we could learn from, right?

But after all we went through with him, after all his crimes and assaults, after his disastrously mismanaged response to a pandemic that killed one million Americans, and after all he did to undermine and ultimately openly attack our democracy, it is inconceivable that we would reelect such a man.

Yet that is what we’ve done. We are officially in the upside down.

There is a temptation, completely understandable, to suspect something in the contest was amiss. We certainly saw the other side do so when they believed their guy couldn’t have lost the 2020 election fair and square. But unlike them, we require that any extraordinary claim produce at least some credible evidence, and we won’t likely find any here. Our elections are secure, despite Russia’s best efforts to disrupt them with bomb threats.

Moreover, to look to foul play, rather than foul decisions, is to absolve the majority of the American electorate of the blame they carry for this catastrophe. 

No, we must talk instead about some hard truths.

Before we do, let me be clear. I won’t spend any time assigning blame, and I’m not interested in hearing it from others. By any objective measure, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz ran a superb campaign; raised record amounts of money; had a forward-looking, positive message; and ran through the tape at the finish line, pedal to the floor, all in just over 100 days time. We were all proud of what they’d accomplished. By contrast, and again by any objective measure, the Trump campaign was crude, mean-spirited, laced with violent rhetoric, fueled by hate and fear, and frankly boring and weird. You know it, and I know it. Even the other side knows it.

Nor was this ever about who was actually the better candidate. Harris, an eloquent, experienced prosecutor, drubbed Trump so badly in the first debate that he fled from even the idea of a second. Harris produced detailed policies and common sense plans for an opportunity economy. Trump had no plans other than his tariffs, and his speeches were uniformly unintelligible, rambling, and on many levels disturbing. His own top aides even came out against him publicly, and our senior military officials warned us all that he is fascist to the core.

His supporters did not listen, or they did not care.

And Harris’s electoral loss came not from any bad choices, such as who to pick as her VP.  You simply don’t lose all seven battlegrounds from that, just as Hillary Clinton didn’t lose because she “didn’t go to Michigan.” There is something far deeper at work.

One hard truth is that a majority of voters simply wanted what Trump offered: a champion for their grievances. I didn’t believe they actually would, but lower propensity male voters came out for Trump in appalling, historic numbers, underscoring the misogyny at the heart of his message and personified by JD Vance. 

Other voters decided to mortgage the future of American democracy out of anger over high grocery bills, failing to understand (thanks to the media) the worldwide nature of post-pandemic inflation, how the Biden Administration had actually succeeded in taming it, or how Trump’s tariffs and economic policies would empty their wallets.

Many progressives, myself included, placed our hopes in the basic goodness and common sense of the American people, who of course would ultimately know better than to put a convicted felon and Russian asset into the Oval Office. This was especially true given how Trump had promised openly to rule as an authoritarian and to come after the press and his political opponents, wielding all the might of a compliant Justice Department and even the military if necessary.

And there, another hard truth: Either the voters don’t believe Trump will do what he has openly promised to do, or they simply don’t care. Neither brings any comfort. 

I lay all this out because if we are to defeat the rising threat of fascism in America, we must be clear-eyed about how it preys upon our weaknesses as a society. 

The same deeply rooted misogyny that has twice kept far more qualified and capable women from the presidency is now also being weaponized to strip away fundamental rights to bodily autonomy. Their next, inevitable, and indeed plainly stated goals include national bans on abortion and contraception. We must understand and prepare for how they will bring these assaults, even while we try to understand why so many women, and in particular white women, continue to support Trump and even voted for him this time around.

Not an easy or comfortable question.

It doesn’t stop there. “Traditional” notions of gender roles are also justifying vicious and sustained attacks upon trans people, whom the GOP demonizes at every turn in order to teach its base how to hate and dehumanize. If we parrot their language, look the other way, and fail to stand up for them, we allow that wedge to be driven deeper, and for discrimination and even calls for “eradication” to flourish. These attacks upon trans people are tests of the extent of our compassion and the strength of our principles, and we must not fail them.

We must also develop a deeper understanding of how racism operates and drives white grievance and white supremacy, which in turn powers the MAGA movement. But this is far more complicated than we understood. For example, we believed, incorrectly, that Trump’s openly racist attacks upon Latinos and threats of mass deportations of migrants would keep those voters in our column. Instead, the hardships of the post-Covid economy endured by Latino families swelled support for Trump within that community, even while African Americans remained relatively committed to the Democrats. If we cannot find a way to win back these voters, the entire American experiment is imperiled.

None of these issues will be solved overnight, nor must we have any of these painful conversations now while we are still in shock and grief from this heartbreaking loss. I raise them here because they are the questions we should truly be weighing, certainly before assigning blame to any of the hardworking team or incredible candidates.

In the end, Kamala Harris did not fail us. We as a nation failed her.

And that is a very hard truth.