In the summer of 2024, the Hamburger Kunsthalle will present the astonishing oeuvre of the English draftsman and graphic artist William Blake (1757–1827), which he created around 1800 against the backdrop of revolution and war in Europe, slavery in the European colonies and oppression in his native Great Britain. Blake's works combine his criticism of the world of the time with a vision of universal redemption. Blake's mystical world of images and his dark literary works still resonate in pop culture today. However, his work is still little known outside of England. The exhibition will be the first to publicly present all of the Blake holdings of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and the legacy of the well-known Blake collector Geoffrey Keynes. The show shows the artist as a true European, although Blake never left Great Britain, and relates his work to selected works by European contemporaries, so that a total of around 120 works will be on view.
A detail from The Ancient of Days (1827) by William Blake. Photograph: Amy Jugg/
Key aspects of Blake's art are illustrated, from his training at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, to his preoccupation with antiquity and the Renaissance, to his enthusiasm for the mystical imagery of the early modern period. The exhibition also compares Blake's work with other artists who, in the face of devastating political crises, turned to visual art in order to rebuild the world: The Romantic Philipp Otto Runge (1777–1810) also sought to express human spiritual renewal in artistic terms to make it visible in a new form. Blake's depictions of the soul's journey from falling to redemption are also compared with works by contemporaries such as his younger compatriot Samuel Palmer (1805-1881) and Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) in order to explore the artistic tensions between individual, national and universal liberation around 1800.
The show is a first-time collaboration between the Hamburger Kunsthalle and the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge. After almost 50 years, it follows on from the cycle “Art around 1800” by the former art gallery director Werner Hofmann, in which Blake's work was presented for the first time and uniquely in Germany in 1975.
