Don't Save the Blake 19 They're Not Worth It ; an Export Licence has Been Refused for Some Blake Drawings. This Is a Primitive and Insular Response

Summary

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WILLIAM Blake is an artist held in such awe and adulation by the British as to make the sane man weep and doubt the nation's connoisseurship.

Painter, draughtsman, engraver, printer, visionary and cod philosopher, Blake's amateurish practices in all these fields are relished by us with innocent delight. That he was eccentric and more than a little mad we find a formidable encouragement to our enthusiasm, for we hate having to take high art too seriously, preferring the childish doggerel of Betjeman to the obscurities of Eliot, and the village-idiot wisdom of Stanley Spencer to the evident cunning of Sickert - Blake is thus our antidote to Reynolds.

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Extract

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Don't Save the Blake 19 They're Not Worth It ; an Export Licence has Been Refused for Some Blake Drawings. This Is a Primitive and Insular Response

To the sceptic, Blake is an artist as wholly dependent on formula as any present-day cartoonist whose style, once formed, never undergoes significant change. His work varies astonishingly in quality, in one drawing considered, deliberate and highly wrought, but in another almost slapdash; it varies from the most delicate and transparent watercolour to dense dark surfaces in tempera that seem to have been reworked and reworked until they ha...

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