Innocence & Experience:
Selections from the Dept. of Drawings & Prints
Metropolitan Museum of Art
February 09, 2023 – May 16, 2023
Reviewed by Ed Voves
Original photos by Anne Lloyd
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has 5,000 years worth of art works to display. It goes without saying that even the Met, vast as it is, needs every square foot of space to present its encyclopedic collection.
Make that every square inch.
What other museums might treat as a transit corridor, the Met curators see as prime exhibition real estate. Gallery 690 is a case in point.
Essentially, Gallery 690 is a passage way on the second floor of the Met, located just to the left of the grand staircase. It is the path most people take as they hasten toward the Impressionist galleries and special exhibition venues like the Tisch Galleries, the site of blockbuster exhibits like last autumn's The Tudors: Art and Majesty.
I have had reason to rethink my hasty behavior. Gallery 690 is the primary site for the display of the riches of the Met's Drawings and Prints Department. Four times each year, the Met's curators mount rotations of prints and pictures, in themed presentations which certainly deserve prolonged study and appreciation.
Founded in 1916, the Drawings and Prints Department at the Met now totals well-over one million works on paper, including 21,000 drawings and 12,000 illustrated books. Along with Gallery 690, the Met has a special study room where art lovers can schedule appointments to study prints and drawings at close hand.
The current display in Gallery 690 made it impossible for me to simply breeze through on my way to the Tisch Galleries. In fact, Anne and I made a special point to visit the Met so that we could immerse ourselves in the winter/spring 2023 rotation of treasures from the Drawings and Prints Department. Entitled Innocence & Experience, this superb display is highlighted by the Met's sensational holdings of works by William Blake, notably his Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience.
William Blake (1757-1827) is, of course, one of the greatest names in British art and literature. Given the importance of Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, you might expect that these masterful "illuminated" pages to be one of the highlights of the Met, constantly on view.
In fact, like all light sensitive prints and pictures, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience must spend long years in darkened solitude. This is done to help mitigate damage done by exposure. The last time Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience were displayed en bloc was the Met's "once in a lifetime" William Blake exhibit in 2001.
William Blake, ignored and disparaged during his lifetime, spent a lot of time himself in seclusion. Moreover, it took long decades after his death in 1827 for his skill as an artist and printmaker to be fully recognized. But, by 1917, Blake's works were being sought by museums and collectors in Britain and the U.S. When a copy of Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience was placed on the art market, the Met purchased this rare illustrated book for its new collection of drawings and prints.
It was a bold decision. If William Blake's visual imagery was gaining recognition by the early years of the twentieth century, his poems remained unsettling and controversial.
Blake's verse mixed prophetic visions, his own and from the Holy Bible, with interpretations of classical mythology and "contrarian" social theories. Blake's writings are among the richest and most challenging works in all of English literature.
The twenty-seven printing plates for Songs of Innocence in 1789 were created by a process called relief etching, which Blake had invented several years before. In this technique, the words of the poem were etched directly onto the plate along with the illustration. This entailed inscribing the words backward, so that they would be readable in the finished print.
The heightened level of mental acuity and technical skill involved in this process reveal Blake to have been one of the most accomplished artists of his era.
The astonishing degree of Blake's accomplishment is made all the more incredible when one sees the actual printed pages of Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience displayed on the walls of Gallery 690. Each is a masterpiece in its own right, a "pocket-sized" miracle of integrated word and image.
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Blake continued to print copies of Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience upon request over the succeeding years. The Met exhibition displays the set of prints commissioned by Edward Calvert in 1825, only a short time before Blake died. Calvert (1799-1883) was a talented artist (several of his otherworldly prints are displayed in the exhibit) and a member of The Ancients. This small band of young idealistic artists led by Samuel Palmer embraced Blake as their mentor.
Calvert's copy of Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience is known as Copy Y to distinguish it from earlier copies. Because each copy was hand-colored, there are often great variations in the different finished books. The Met's Copy Y has a congenial, "child-friendly" look which is very different from that of Copy F in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art. This variation can be seen in the following comparison of the prints of Blake's immortal poem, The Tyger, from these two respective copies.
By 1794, when the combined volume appeared, the mood in Britain had dramatically turned. The initial hopes for peaceful reform in France had been dashed, war between the two nations was declared and idealists like Blake were increasingly viewed with suspicion. In 1803, Blake was accused of sedition after an argument with a drunken soldier. Although the jury returned an innocent verdict, Blake's artistic career never recovered.
Blake expressed his visions in a personal vocabulary and a cast of unique protagonists much as J.R.R. Tolkein would later do. And just as initial incredulity about Tolkien's Hobbits gave way to world-wide acclaim, so Blake's prophecies would over-time be vindicated.
"Over-time" however took a very long time. Blake's The Chimney Sweeper from Songs of Experience testifies to just how prolonged the process of social reform in Great Britain could be.
In this passionate protest, Blake denounced the appalling practice of forcing pre-teen boys to clean filthy, begrimed chimneys. This dangerous task was done often with fires still lit or smoldering while the boys brushed away the noxious coal dust and soot. Despite Blake's passionate protest, the horrifying practice was not outlawed until 1873.
When The Chimney Sweeper is contrasted with Little Boy Lost or Infant Joy, the sentimental words and images of these pages from Songs of Innocence seem as if they come from a lost pre-Industrial Revolution paradise. Blake knew that such a realm had not existed, at least in recent times, in Britain. Instead, the nation, despite its wealth and power, was gripped by the "cold and usurous hand" which figures so memorably in Holy Thursday from Songs of Experience.
Yet, Blake, despite the derisive criticism and threadbare poverty which blighted his life, never lost faith that rays of God's light would bring the "mercy, pity, peace and love," which serve as the refrain of The Divine Image, to our all-too human hearts.
"Mercy, pity, peace and love" feature in many of the works of art which accompany those of Blake in the Innocence & Experience exhibition in Gallery 690. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, Edgar Degas and Kathe Kollwitz are all represented (or depicted) by images which stress the common - and quietly extraordinary - aspirations which bond all of humanity.
The works of art chosen for the quarterly rotations in Gallery 690 are linked by subject themes or technical elements which provide an underlying unity to these wonderful displays of prints and drawings. Often the emotional impact is quite moving, as I have commented upon at some length in this review.
But there is always room for humor in most artistic endeavors. Even Hamlet is enlivened by a moment or two of comic relief. I was glad to see that the Met curators had wittily chosen a rather jaunty, non-threatening lion by George Stubbs to join Blake's fearsome Tyger on the walls of Gallery 690.
Did the "immortal hand" which "made the lamb make thee", lion?
I, for one, have no doubt that the answer to Blake's existential question in The Tyger is yes! God made the tiger, the lion and the lamb. And me and you.
Here at last, in Gallery 690 at the Met, is a "Peaceable Kingdom" of sorts. Stubbs' lion and Blake's lamb can rest together in the spirit of "mercy, pity, peace and love."
And so can we.
