Morris Eaves, The
Counter-Arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of Blake
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992). *
Joseph Viscomi
The Counter-Arts Conspiracy—what a perfect title for a book that examines William Blake's various, often vicious, and seemingly neurotic responses to the aesthetic fashions, art markets, and technological developments of his day. The phrase "counter-arts" is Blake's and refers to false or anti-art—paintings and prints he considers imitations instead of originals. That such works dominated the art market seemed to Blake proof of conspiracy, proof that true artists were being deliberately thwarted and the public ingeniously manipulated. Indeed, such suspicions underlie his well-known statements that Joshua Reynolds, president of the Royal Academy, was "Hired to Depress Art" and that "Engraving as an Art is Lost in England." These statements, however, appear random and disconnected and not, as Counter-Arts sets out to prove, expressions of a unified history of art in which a theory of conspiracy plays a dominant role. The meaning and structure, or even existence, of Blake's history of art, let alone a coherent and well-grounded theory of conspiracy, are obscure because the "English-school discourse"—as Eaves calls the various eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century histories attempting to explain England's failure to produce a viable and internationally competitive school of painting—has been neglected. Consequently, Blake appears to be "in the rhetorical position of a religious fanatic harassing passers-by on a street corner" instead of an artist "joining an important conversation with a history," one "about painting and engraving [with] subtopics relevant to the working artists of the time: the national situation of their arts, the commercial viability of their products, the usefulness of their ideology, [and] the adequacy of available technology to their technological requirements" (xvii).
The importance of Blake's
context has not eluded scholars and students of Blake, but attempts at
reconstructing it have paid more attention to what Blake and his contemporaries
were producing, or to the political, religious, literary, or philosophical
texts they were reading, than to what artists, printmakers, dealers, critics,
theorists, and connoisseurs were saying about
art, themselves, and the nation. These histories have been ignored because they
were supposedly irrelevant to what was produced, a negligence reflecting an
inherent bias in traditional art history against theory in general and English
art in particular, and not against Blake per se. Instead, attention has been
paid to questions of style, genre, date, and identification. Moreover, the
paradigm in traditional art history is oil painting, leaving little room for
graphic art and works on paper, like watercolor drawings, a medium peculiarly
English. If "English art" seems like an oxymoron, then—despite "Blake's
installation in the literary canon"—sound scholarship on his theories of art
will seem impossible (xvi).
Things have changed somewhat
since the appearance of John Barrell's Political
Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt, Albert Boime's Art in an Age of Revolution, 1750-1800, and
a few other new historical analyses of the period. But Eaves is correct to
imply that these works have not altered sufficiently the view that Blake was
isolated and his ideas about art just plain strange. Though Eaves and Barrell
examine some of the same texts, Eaves covers more ground, including the history
of print technology c. 1760 to 1840. Barrell perceives Blake's ideas almost
exclusively in relation to Reynolds, who is, as Eaves demonstrates, just one of
the figures with whom Blake was arguing; others included engravers ignored by
Reynolds but not by Blake. Both Eaves and Barrell examine Blake's metaphors for
the many in the one and one in the many, and they construct a similar dialectic
between liberal individualism and community or civic humanitas, but Barrell
places Blake at the latter end of the continuum, while Eaves places him very
much at the former. The main difference between the two, however, is that Eaves
focuses on Blake and uses Blake's writings to open up the context. The more we
learn about the debates over such issues as line engraving versus tonal
methods, art versus commerce, private versus public patronage, the better we
come to understand Blake and his place in the discourse; conversely, the better
we understand Blake's writings on art, the better we come to understand his
times—and to see him as a man of his times, for better or worse.
Counter-Arts is beautifully and effectively
designed as an oblong folio with two columns of text, illustrations, and notes
on the same page, and a third column for commentary on the illustrations. This
commentary often crosses sections, reinforcing the sense of multiple
discourses. The book begins with an annotated "Cast of Some Contemporary
Characters," a very helpful roundup of the usual suspects: painters and patrons
like Fuseli, Reynolds, Barry, Boydell, Flaxman, and Hayley, as well as some who
will be new to students of Blake and romanticism, like the engravers Valentine
Green, John Pye II, and John Landseer, who, like Blake, viewed commerce and art
as antithetical. Most of the cast is introduced in the first two of the book's
four parts: "Nation: The Making of an English School of Painters" and
"Commerce: A New Maecenas." Parts 1 and 2 supply the necessary background for
part 3, "Religion: A Christian History of Engraving," which examines Blake's
take on the problem of the English school, why it failed, and how it could be
realized, and part 4, "Technology: The Artistic Machine," which examines the
advances in technology that fueled Blake's anticommercialism and his claim that
engraving as an art is lost. Taken together, the four parts reconstruct more
thoroughly than any previous work Blake's aesthetic, theoretical, and
rhetorical context.
The English-school discourse centered around three questions: where are we? how did we get here? what must we do to develop? To continental critics like Winekelmann and Dubos, art in England looked hopelessly provincial, with no prospects for improvement, because the answer to the second question was England's climate: it was suitable for poets and scientists but not for painters, who, the theory went, needed light and warmth similar to that of Greece or Italy. English artists saw things differently. They knew they hadn't yet "arrived" but were confident, especially after the establishment of the Royal Academy in 1768 and its theoretical emphasis on history painting, that they were finally on their way. What was missing was not the right climate but the right opportunities or means, though exactly what these were constituted the heart of the debate. It seems that each history of art found different impediments to progress and proposed different solutions, which included private and public patronage, academies, galleries, markets, education, and a return to the policies of pre-Reformation England, when decorating churches and public spaces was encouraged. Eaves analyses the histories as narratives, citing plots, conflicts, characters, analogies, and metaphors, and revealing the ways they allude to or were shaped by earlier histories of art—most notably Vasari's history of ancient Greece and Rome. Vasari's idea that ancient art developed slowly encouraged many English theoreticians to hope they were on the ascending part of the cycle. Eaves' intensely literary analysis of aesthetic texts and histories of art yields enormous detail, which at times threatens to overwhelm his principal themes but more often uncovers connections overlooked—or impossible to make—in conventional thematic examination. When read as narratives and at this level of detail, Blake's commentaries continually provide the shock of the old; Blake's gender references and the male bias in his mythology, for example, reflect metaphors (e.g., harmony as female and melody as male) that were deeply entrenched in the English-school discourse (255). Moreover, his comments sound less strident and strange as answers to questions that are, after all, at the center of many of his illuminated books. Indeed, Jerusalem "is, among other things of course, a considered reply to English-school discourse," which arrives "at the Human Form Divine as [its] figurative alternative to the mechanistic naturalism of orthodox aesthetic harmony" (271).
The most famous answer to the third question underlying the English-school discourse was provided by the printseller Alderman Boydell, the "New Maecenas" of part 2. Trained as an engraver, Boydell acted on the insight that engraving transformed paintings into commercial products and that the sale of engravings could finance the development of history painting. Beginning in 1786, Boydell commissioned paintings illustrating scenes from Shakespeare, which were then engraved over the next decade. This enormous commercial project included an exhibition gallery and a newly edited edition of Shakespeare with a second set of reduced engravings. Boydell's Shakespeare project provided the formula behind those hatched by rival publishers (41), though it was itself based on formulas of production and public relations perfected by Wedgwood, who appropriated the vocabulary of art collecting to his wares (41). Despite the patriotic rhetoric of public man with the nation's interest at heart, Boydell had good reason for promoting engravings of history paintings. Portraiture, though financially lucrative in England, had no legs, whereas history paintings and their engraved reproductions had potential international appeal and thus a far larger market.
Generally regarded as a national hero, Boydell was also criticized for "resorting to fast, cheap methods of reproduction" (153). Benjamin West, one of the few academicians who acknowledged the importance of engraving—as well he should, since his reputation, like so many other painters, depended in part on engraved reproductions of his works, mostly by Woollett—found the Shakespeare engravings shoddy, noting that their "inferior quality" was due to "a mixture of dotting and engraving" (153). By dotting, West means stipple (though aquatint was also used), a technique in which special bent burins and assorted tools dotted the copper plate in imitation of the reticulated texture of chalk or graphite on paper. Landseer made the same complaint, arguing that only the strong and determined lines of engraving proper and not the softness of stipple could do justice to the grandeur of history painting. Stipple was easier and quicker to produce, and from Landseer's view, it catered to the public's desire for unfinished drawings and sketches. To use stipple to reproduce history paintings, then, was to reduce an artist's last and mature thoughts, as reflected in the finished work, to the status of a preliminary drawing, of first and unfinished thoughts.
While Boydell's mode of
representation was criticized as impure, motivated by fast and cheap new
technologies, the severest criticism was leveled at what Boydell himself
represented. Seen positively, he and his fellow printsellers supplied the means
for artists to free themselves from aristocratic patronage and provided the
public with free choice. Seen negatively, however, they were not agents of
liberty and change but obstacles between articles and audience (68-9). In this
light, they were, as Pasquin charged in 1796, "vulgar, oppressive reptiles, who
call themselves Publishers, that is, a body of worthless wretches, who rob the
artists of all the honey of their labour, and stand between them and the
Public, as in intermediate purgatory" (90). The failure of the various
commercial galleries (due in large part to the war with France closing most of
the international market) helped to generate this anti-commercialism as well as
to reactivate the rhetoric of state and private patronage, which, as Eaves
explains, was anachronistic in an age of an emerging middle class. But the wish
for enlightened and unpatronizing patrons reflected the distrust of dealers,
the vilification of commerce, and "the tendency to delete or disguise
mercantile elements in the discourse" (26). In these alternative histories,
printsellers are greedy mediators who either failed to educate the public taste
or succeeded only to subjugate the once free engraver. As art becomes
manufacture, artists become mechanics and the creative process becomes labor,
resulting in the nation's loss of the grand projects to which art is more
suitable. When rendered a mere commodity, art is robbed of special or
transcendent value, or so it seemed to Hazlitt, Landseer, Barry, and others,
for whom the failure of the English school was not accidental but the result of
cunning men, cliques, cabals, or secret machinations (144). These alternative
histories, anti-commercial and inclined to see conspiracy everywhere, echo
strains from earlier discourse and rhetorically and thematically sound very
much like Blake—or Blake like them.
The idea that conspiracy was afoot was certainly not unique to Blake's fevered imagination. As Eaves shows, it had long played an erratic though undeveloped role in English-school discourse (175). What is unique is how thoroughly grounded in the Bible Blake's history of art is, and while that comes as no surprise, the dialectic structuring the history does. It is between Jesus and the Law, between type and countertype, writer and reviser, with Jesus undoing the latter (110). This primary opposition is manifest in the conflict between originality and imitation, the former free-standing and the latter dependent on the former for its identity. In this view, producing an original engraving not only frees one from the secondary status of craft, but frees one from priesthood and state, whose power rests on the Law that falsely claims to speak for God. The very act of producing original graphic art, then, is to hear prophet-like the voice of God within. Blake's history is "emphatically conspiratorial—a Christian analogue being the schemes directed against Jesus by hypocritical Romans secretly in league with hypocritical priests who patronize a double cross by a member of Jesus's inner circle" (136-7). Hence, Rubens and Vandyck, who in most histories of art were seen as the potential saviors of English art, foreign emissaries providing the locals with opportunities to learn new skills and develop taste but thwarted by the English reformation and overthrow of Charles I, were perceived by Blake in political and Biblical terms: as false gods brought into a nation grown weak because its own monarch rejected the one true God.
For
Blake, the failure of English art is synonymous with art losing its way, or
rather, having its rightful place usurped by the counter-arts of imitation
adapted for commerce (176). In this sense, Eaves argues, Blake's history of art
is analogous to his history of religion as expressed in plate 11 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In the
primal past, artists, like ancient poets and prophets, heard the word of God
directly and produced works of art that were original in the two ways Eaves
defines originality: in being closest to the origin, or God, and in being the
latest or newest—and thus an inherently individualist—expression (147). The
solution to the English-school problem lies in artists reclaiming what they
have lost: the ability to work without models, without imitating either nature
or one another. In short, it lies in working from the imagination. Blake's
contemporaries, on the other hand, believe the solution lies in institutions,
huge commercial projects, great man patronage, fairer markets, or an educated
public, because they define the core impediment to development as ignorance.
Blake agrees that ignorance rules the day, but his definition is "fundamentally
different" and "accomodates conspiratorial logic" (163). For Blake, as Eaves
demonstrates, ignorance—whether the Academy's, producer's, dealer's, or
buyer's—comes after and not before
development; that is, it is a forgetting of the original vision that is
"artfully propagated" by political and mysterious forces conspiring against the
imagination.
Blake's dialectic of
original and copy supports Eaves' claim that "severe oppositions ... structure
Blake's theorizing" (184) in that it fails to distinguish one kind of copy from
an other. "Translations" and "imitations" are treated as the same discredited
product, which is not the same as treating them as aesthetic or philosophical
synonyms, as they are in Counter-Arts (219).
When Blake asserts, "Englishmen rouze yourselves from the fatal Slumber into
which Booksellers & Trading Dealers have thrown you Under the artfully
propagated pretence that a Translation or a Copy of any kind can be as
honourable to a Nation as An Original" (Public
Address), he means to refute Landseer's argument that engraving was an art
because it was translation and not imitation. By imitation, Landseer meant
stipples and aquatints that reproduced the codes of the original medium,
whereas engraving reproduced the original image in a code distinctly its own.
In imitations, the graphic code and thus the hand of the printmaker is erased
or hidden, whereas in translations, the virtuosity of the translator is
everywhere present. (The distinction is comparable to the one Coleridge makes
between copy and imitation.) Hence, to Landseer, engravings are works of art
even if reproductive, because translation is an art requiring skill, intellect,
and judgment, qualities missing in the easier and cheaper tonal technologies,
which Landseer refers to as "illegitimate" engraving. Blake, however, dismisses
the argument by grouping together what Landseer differentiates, arguing instead
that the art of engraving lies in its image being invented by the engraver and
executed in firm line.
Counter-Arts knows
that the enormous popularity of tonal processes caused the decline of legitimate
engraving and
was reason enough for most engravers to suspect
Landseer's attacks on
printsellers and his defense of engraving help greatly to contextualize Blake's
rhetoric and anger. They also reveal exactly where Blake deviates from his
contemporaries. Perhaps the most significant deviation is Blake's hatred of
William Woollett, Robert Strange, and the pre-stipple Bartolozzi, the engravers
that Landseer, as well as most painters, critics, and other engravers, believed
represented the apex of the art. Why Blake hated this trio as much as Rubens,
Vandyke, and Titian, or Bacon, Newton, and Locke, is the central question for
the second half of Counter-Arts. Blake's
demonization of Woollett and company was not solely due to personal grievances,
as proposed by Dennis Read (who excavated the historical context for the Public Address), or to Blake's sense that he was being left out of an important and
financially lucrative project hatched by his enemy Cromek for the recently
formed Chalcographic Society (156). The rejection no doubt embittered Blake,
but something deeper prevents him from agreeing with the common consensus.
Writing the Public Address appears to
have been Blake's attempt at understanding his anger and not just defending it.
The result is his christian history of art, whose binary oppositions reveal
Woollett to be a copyist and critics to be ignorant for thinking that a copyist
could be responsible for developing the art
of engraving.
Blake
makes the analogy that Woollett's engraving style is to true engraving what
Venetian and Flemish painting styles are to true painting, accusing both styles
of being imitative and mechanical. But this is a rather startling comparison,
because the painting style, through its overt brushwork and coloring, calls
attention to the processes by which it is made, whereas Wollett's high-finish
engraving style had become so familiar that its code became transparent—which
is why Landseer defamiliarized it rhetorically, i.e., reminding viewers of just
how remarkable that translating code is. But to Blake, both styles are
mechanical because they generalize forms and are the products of labor much
divided, dependent on what Blake complained "all could do equally well" instead
of on "individual merit." These changes in production reflect the pressures
exerted by commerce and by those whose vested interests required ever faster
and cheaper modes of reproduction. The power of the printseller, then, lay not
just in determining whose work sold and in dumbing down public taste, but more
ominously in conspiring to dehumanize the individual and to keep engravers as
craftsmen—and replaceable ones at that (213).
According to Eaves, Blake's
hatred of the artistic machine reflects an anti-technical tendency (183)
comparable to Wordsworth's and other Romantics' disdain of artificiality (236).
After arguing that "conception is execution, and their shared sign is drawing"
(179), Eaves states that this is a false polemic in Blake's thinking, that
Blake, like Reynolds, stressed the mental over physical and that the structure
of his own thinking required it. Reynolds associated painting with intellect or
invention to raise its status above that of craft. He warned students of the
seduction of the latter, of the material body and handling that is paint and
painting. Eaves contends that Blake followed suit, his practices and comments
extolling the importance of execution notwithstanding, and that the base
metaphors of Blake's anticommercialism required a conflict between mental and
physical, the latter category associated with commerce, execution, and
technique (176). Instead of pointing to the ways in which practice possibly
contradicts Blake's statements, or to possible inconsistencies in the theory
itself, Eaves assumes that Blake was more suspicious of execution than he lets
on. "In fact Blake's value system is strongly at work orienting the items in
the series toward conception and away from execution, toward the 'Mental' and
away from the 'Corporeal'" (179). For Eaves, the central oppositions in the Public Address are mental. "Blake
assigns values to intellectual states (genius/fool, smart/ dumb), usually
working in extremes but implying the range in between. The basic values are
coordinated by the master opposition of mental against physical, which is nowhere
stated but everywhere implied, as in the contemptuous treatment of mindless
physical labor" (164-5). According to Eaves, the physical, which includes
execution, is always predicated on the mental, whereas the mental is not
dependent on the physical. Indeed, "integration is unidirectional. The mental
may dignify the physical; the reverse seems inconceivable" (165).
That
Blake advocated a unidirectional movement and failed to imagine the reverse is
questionable. In practice, invention and execution are interactive, with the
hand supplying as well as receiving ideas. Eaves does not deny this, and he
recognizes that such interaction occurs more in autographic techniques such as
drawing and relief etching than in reproductive engraving (184-5). He does not pursue
this line of reasoning, though, which is perfectly understandable in a book
devoted to Blake's theories and not their relation to practice. But it is also
at the level of theory that the idea of unidirectional movement is
questionable. Is the premise that "severe oppositions . . . structure Blake's
theorizing" (184) always true? As
noted, the case of original versus copy required Blake to equate "translation"
and "imitation" and thereby dismiss a third term then much in play in the
graphic discourse. But arguing that Blake is anti-technical because he is
anti-Venetian or anti-Woollett, as though machines, material execution, and
labor are all synonymous, is quite a jump. One could also argue that Blake
safeguards the sacredness of invention not by separating it from execution,
like Reynolds, but by differentiating execution from labor. In Blake's letters
and major prophecies, the word "labor" is regularly modified by the adjectives
"mighty," "immense," and "incessant," but in his theories and histories of art,
labor is usually "endless" and "manual" and associated with journeyman hack
work—work Eaves correctly refers to as "mindless," responding to Blake's idea
of copying as something "any body may do" and which "the fool often will do ...
best as it is a work of no Mind." This labor is mindless and is associated with
imitation because it is separated from conception, but execution, by one of
Eaves' own definitions of originality—as the integration of invention and
execution (177)—is not mindless. Blake never uses the words "invention" or
"execution" when speaking of Woollett, and he applies the latter term only
three times to his enemies, each time mockingly. Conversely, he routinely uses
the word "execution" with "invention" when speaking of his own works and those
of his heroes Raphael, Michaelangelo, and Durer.
While the "severe
opposition" of original and imitation required Blake to dismiss a third term,
his defense of original art versus imitation relative to its material
manifestation required his creating or qualifying a third term, labor, which
was a debased execution, a series of tricks characteristic of journeymen
imitating the forms and ideas of others. As Blake says, "He who copies does not
Execute he only Imitates what is already Executed." Instead of execution
proper, imitators engage in "Unappropriate Execution ... the Most nauseous of
all affection & foppery." The "artistic machine" is execution separated
from invention, and it is subject to exactly the kind of division and
interchangeable parts that Eaves describes. By differentiating between
execution and ` Journeymans Labour," Blake acknowledges in theory that the
materiality of original works of art differs qualitatively from that of
imitation. Elevating the dirty part of the creative process—execution—to the
status of invention is, it seems to me, one of Blake's most important
contributions to the English-school discourse—and one of the least surprising,
since Blake comes out of a tradition of work, of execution and labor. To Eaves
"all tools signify compromises that This World makes necessary. There are no
burins in eternity" (185). Yet how inviting would an artist-craftsman find an
eternity without tools and art, particularly if, as Blake claims, true art,
like his Vision of the Last Judgment,
is visionary and imaginative, and
"This world of Imagination is the World of Eternity"? Is Blake a
transcendentalist, with matter oriented toward mind, or an incarnationalist,
with mind manifest in matter? Blake asserts that "Execution is only the result
of Invention," but he also says that "Invention depends Altogether upon
Execution." The question is at the heart of Blake scholarship, and Eaves is
clear about which direction he thinks Blake moved.
As noted, Counter-Arts does not address the
contradictions in Blake's theory relative to his practices. Blake's relief
line, for example, is not the wiry bounding line defined in the Public Address, whose symbolic
significance anchors much of Eaves' interpretation of Blake's theory and
history of art. It is bold and painterly, made with a brush, and in color
printing it was usually obscured. Nor are Blake's stipple lines firm and
distinct, and Blake was a fine stipple engraver. But noting the contradictions
between theory and practice is not the objective of this study. Eaves is
concerned more with what Blake said than with what he did, with the origins,
coherence, and uniqueness of Blake's theories and histories of art. Likewise,
Eaves is interested in the effect that the idea
of commerce had on Blake's theories and histories of art, and not on the
actual performance of the market or even Blake's practical attempts to increase
his share of it. The works that explore the relation between Blake's theory and
practice or between his practice and those dominating the market of his day
still need to be written, but they will not and cannot be written without
consulting Counter-Arts. Nor can
future readings of Blake's poetry ignore this study, for it illuminates the
aesthetic and rhetorical origins and meanings of many of the most essential
conflicts and oppositions in Blake's mythological poetry.