William Blake’s Universe review – polymath’s paintings are outclassed by the Germans | Art and design

If any artist was ever a one-off it’s William Blake. To start with, “artist” isn’t quite the right word for Blake who is also one of the greatest poets in the English language. His images and his words are intertwined in his (very) limited edition illuminated books, printed as he puts it in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell “in the infernal method, by corrosives … melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid”.

Putting on a good exhibition of this artist is no mean feat, for you have to give instant visual access to a mind whose original, often obscure ideas take 944 pages to express in my edition of Blake’s Complete Writings. Cambridge flunks it. The Fitzwilliam Museum gets so distracted by other artists that it never really takes you into Blake’s “Universe”, as the show’s title promises.

Unless by Blake’s universe they mean his wider historical context. There’s plenty of that. A row of self-portraits stare intensely on one wall, yet none are Blake’s. His follower Samuel Palmer depicts himself in an ethereal trance, pale and fervent; his Irish contemporary James Barry glowers broodingly. They were connected directly with the show’s purported star – “Barry was hid. I am hid”, wrote Blake of their common struggle against the art establishment – but he probably didn’t even know his German contemporaries, Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich, existed. Runge scrutinises himself with sickly melancholy while Friedrich depicts himself with a bandaged eye, not covering any physical injury but suggesting his wounded soul.

There’s a simple way to state what these self-portraits are telling us: Blake belonged to the Romantic age. His own image is held up as an icon of that era on the opposite wall with portraits of his huge, strong head by friends and familiars, including his wife, Catherine Blake, who makes him look like a supernatural fairy being.

He stands apart in this gathering: a mystery, a prodigy, whom his fans accepted might be able to see the monstrous “ghost of a flea” or the spirit of John Milton. Yet the curators can’t make that leap of faith. They hold back, lecturing us about the historical moment in which Blake’s Tyger mind was forged, chaining him down.

Anything as simple as saying Blake was a Romantic in the age of Romantics is evaded. Instead, the show lengthily explores the argument that far from being untutored, he belonged to a generation of artists across Europe shaped by a training in which they drew casts of classical sculpture. His education in the Royal Academy also gave him a good knowledge of Raphael and Michelangelo.

Sounds dull? It isn’t. That’s not the problem. It’s that the other artists totally outclass Blake. Runge’s drawing The Woman with the Possessed Boy is a meticulous copy of a detail from Raphael, but what he sees reflects his inner turbulence. He terrifyingly renders the boy’s possessed eyes as blank spheres and the two bodies as if they were conjoined twins. It’s exquisitely classical and totally psychotic.

This is just the start of German Romanticism’s ebullient and addictive takeover of the exhibition. Runge and Friedrich outdo Blake in sheer weirdness. He is made to seem pedestrian – the last failing you’d expect – by their disturbing dreams.

Runge and Blake have similarities, sure: Blake’s image of two faery figures sitting on a flower, shown here with other woozy pages from The Song of Los, has obvious analogies with the German in its fantastical view of nature. But as a purely visual artist Runge is more bracing. And that’s before you get to the climactic series of sepia drawings by Friedrich in which, after the world takes shape from chaos, two lovers make their way through life. We see them talking in a meadow, then later as old people visiting the ruins of a monastery framed against the stark sky and finally as skeletons in a cave swarming with stalactites, a proliferation of rocky forms in which the Earth returns to its primal formlessness.

Now that’s Romanticism. And what do we have from Blake? A whole section devoted to his later religious art, in which he creates quite conventional Christian imagery.

It’s hard to believe the curators like him at all when they put him in his place so thoroughly. The point of Blake is the ebullient and unique totality of his vision, which you have to dive into and embrace. This show barely dips a toe. It is far from huge, which means its inclusion of so much other art means it has to skimp on Blake himself.

There’s only one sheet, for instance, from his masterpiece Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and it is The Little Black Boy. The long caption awkwardly attempts to reconcile Blake’s opposition to slavery with the far-from-modern way he writes about Blackness. Having recently reread him I can confirm that while he often returns to enslavement in his writings (“Enslaved” is the first word in Visions of the Daughters of Albion), he is clearly a racist by modern standards. He also lived more than two centuries ago.

Maybe there really is a crisis in our relationship with Blake for it is so bound up with the belief that he’s a radical, a good guy, on the left. Actually, his philosophy is not socialist at all. “One law for the lion & ox is oppression”, declares this mystical anarchist in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Blake is not only a rare individual but a philosophical individualist, whose provocations don’t come through here.