William Blake and the Age of Aquarius by Stephen Eisenman with Mark Crosby, Elizabeth Ferrell, Jacob Henry Leveton, W.J.T. Mitchell & John P. Murphy

Mythical 1960s! What a wonderful generation that one: what an inspiring period that one! Plenty of great ideals, freedom of every kind, liberties, rights, and a new more open conception of life.
It still is the historical moment I love the most! because fresh, revolutionary, developed by students.

Universities, students, inspired people, politicians, let's remember John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Martin Luther King,  wanted to change the world.

The 1960s brought a new conception of life, more rights to the minorities, to black people and in general a more opened vision of life. Of course there were a lot of distortions, drug abuse, important departures because of personal excessive abuses but the 1960s the most beautiful flame, because people were active and not passive and because they felt that the world could be changed. In our age situation is different like  remarked in one of the chapter of this book and people are more resigned and passive regarding  important thematic and... disoriented, scared, pessimistic.
People in 1960s scared because of atomic fear, racism, separatism, a world divided in two blocks, but...

That people knew what they wanted and they fought with great energy for obtaining with success, sometimes losing their own life, their personal rights.

William Blake and the Age of Aquarius by Stephen Eisenman with Mark Crosby, Elizabeth Ferrell, Jacob Henry Leveton, W.J.T. Mitchell & John P. Murphy is a catalog about one of the most beloved artist and "inspirators" of 1960s culture, the so-called Beat Generation, the age of that Children of Flowers. Published by Princeton Press this book was born thanks to an exhibition curated at the Mary and  Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University.

William Blake is an artist with his obscurity and his light, with his strong messages and his positions. He put his soul in his work.

It was during the 1960s that William Blake was rediscovered becoming one of the flags for the American students. A poet and painter with a lot to saying and transmit revealing to everyone an artist in grade to speak with his own revolutionary words and paintings powerfully in the 1900s.

Blake has been an anti-conformist man. Courageous, anti-conformist choices meant to him  a life spent in poverty but  authenticity. Blake didn't live a life of compromises, he was a person who represented his soul in paintings and writing and that's why he will live in the Eternity.

Born in 1757 his idea of religion anti-conformist like the one of his parents. He started to work as an engraver and later he fought for obtaining more rights for this profession considered not-artistic. Later thanks to the Antique School of Royal Academy as probatory student he started to make drawings of statues but more in general Blake, continuing to work as an engraver, was defining his future.

Thanks to his frequent visions, the works by William Blake are original and there is a personal to my point of view ideas of chaos, "apocalyptic visions" that it is fascinating and scaring, stunning and beauty.

People and divinities are never represented in their "environment" but in their lyricism, in their own glory and in a sort of dream-land where bestiality and humanity lives in a complete fusion,where an aspect can't be divided by the other one, but where at the end the glory of a superior creature will present that light in grade to find according to my modest point of view an escapism from the most difficult situations.
If you see William Blake's The Dance of Albion or the Great Red Dragon, Newton, Ancient of Days, you will understand what I want to say. Light is an element of big importance for Blake in his paintings for trying to find escapism, for trying to find in the chaos and darkness the security of certainty, thanks to light.

The lecture given by Blake of our world is of great complexity  because of his extraordinary personal vision. Two worlds, the one of the Dead one and the world of the living one united and cemented in his paintings.

Chaos and order, this psychedelic vision of life was the main theme for most and very well-known artists from Patti Smith to the Doors, from Allen Ginsberg to Agnes Martin, and the hymn of the people of the 1960s in art, writing, photography! because William Blake was a powerful poet as well.

In the book many example of impressive artists, photographers inspired by William Blake and his original art.

Highly recommended.



Exhibition schedule at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University
From September 23 to March 11 2018

Anna Maria Polidori