William Blake: The Painter at Work - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1854374680 ISBN 13: 9781854374684

Publisher: TATE, 2003

Synopsis

This text aims to offer an innovative and revealing approach to one of the most individual of all British artists. The publication is dedicated to exploring the practical methods behind his unique style.

About this title

Review

Conservation scientist Joyce H. Townsend is the Tate Museum's answer to coroner Gus Grissom on TV's CSI. Only instead of solving murders, she sleuths out the violence done to great art. In this book, she and her colleagues explain the horrors time, faded pigments, and dumb owners have visited on Blake's paintings, use a slew of high-tech techniques to deduce his methods and open our eyes to his original intentions. If you haven't read this book, you probably don't know what Blake's work looks like. Skillfully employing gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, lasers, Fourier transform infra-red spectrometry, and good old-fashioned saliva on a cotton swab, they scrub away dirt, yellowed varnish, and moronic overpaintings, and reveal how Blake wanted you to see. A tiny edge of blue indicates the firmament that Satan originally strode through in the now-yellowed Satan in His Original Glory. The chemical "Maillard reaction" has horribly browned The Ghost of a Flea; a small detail illustration reveals the original brilliant, star-studded blue Blake intended. The detective work is fascinating, and the profuse illustrations both technically and esthetically illuminating. Blake would have sung hosannas over this book: it cleanses the doors of perception. --Tim Appelo

From the Back Cover

"This is a major contribution to Blake scholarship, the first of its kind in many ways. I suspect that it may also set the standard for other such studies of artists. All the essays are firmly grounded in research: materialist, technical, scientific, historical. The information they provide is truly that--information--with accompanying insights, not the sort of speculative interpretations so frequently encountered in literary and iconographic studies of Blake."--Robert Essick, author of William Blake, Printmaker and William Blake and the Language of Adam

About this edition

• Publisher: TATE
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1854374680
• ISBN 13: 9781854374684
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192
• Editor: Joyce Townsend