William Blake and the age of Aquarius

Abstract

A stunningly illustrated look at how Blake's radical vision influenced artists of the Beat generation and 1960s counterculture. In his own lifetime, William Blake (1757-1827) was a relatively unknown nonconventional artist with a strong political bent. William Blake and the Age of Aquarius is a beautifully illustrated look at how, some two hundred years after his birth, the antiestablishment values embodied in Blake's art and poetry became a model for artists of the American counterculture. This book provides new insights into the politics and protests of Blake's own lifetime, and the generation of artists who revived and reimagined his work in the mid-1940s through 1970, or what might be called the 'long sixties.' Contributors explore Blake's outsider status in Georgian England and how his individualistic vision spoke to members of the Beat Generation, hippies, radical poets and writers, and other voices of the counterculture. - Among the artists, musicians, and writers who looked to Blake were such diverse figures as Diane Arbus, Jay DeFeo, the Doors, Sam Francis, Allen Ginsberg, Jess, Agnes Martin, Ad Reinhardt, Charles Seliger, Maurice Sendak, Robert Smithson, Clyfford Still, and many others. ---Exhibition: Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Evanston, Illinois, United States (23.09.2017 - 11.03.2018).

Contents

William Blake and the Age of Aquarius / by Stephen F. Eisenman -- Prophets, madmen, and millenarians / by Mark Crosby -- William Blake on the West Coast / Elizabeth Ferrell -- William Blake and art against surveillance / Jacob Henry Leveton -- Building Golgonooza in the Age of Aquarius / John P. Murphy -- Sendak, Blake, and the image of childhood / Mark Crosby -- Blake now and then / W.J.T. Mitchell.