YouSaid · the spoken record

William Blake

lines on the record: 34
first: 2024-06-11
most recent: 2024-06-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I mean, it's amazing. I mean, it's one of the great movies, I think, of the last 20 years, and it's entirely inspired by William. And it's like William Blake's come to life and animated. It's like inhabited this film, it's truly astonishing.”
2024-06-11 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks – William Blake: Artist, Poet and Visionary, with Andrew Graham-Dixon and John Higgs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So my favorite one is, do you know the film Dead Man, Jim Chalmers? Yes, yes, yes. Absolutely fantastic. Complete as a friend of mine, as a film director said I could never have thought of that film. I mean, it's completely mad. It's all shot in black and white, and there's a guy who's an accountant and he ends up in some lost town in the Wild West. And as soon as he arrives, the whole town is torched by some bandits, and he's left for dead. And he gets rescued by an Indian. And his name happens to be William Blake. But the Indian guy, who's this sort of old Indian guy, A shamanic Indian in the wild west who's rescuing this accountant. He has happened to have been to London.”
2024-06-11 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks – William Blake: Artist, Poet and Visionary, with Andrew Graham-Dixon and John Higgs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and it's very, and then on the other hand. Somebody who knows Blake a bit knocks on the door, and Blake answers the door completely naked, invites him into the garden, and Mary completely naked. And he says, Hello, yeah, do come out with us. We're Adam and Eve So his wasn't a marriage hers.”
2024-06-11 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks – William Blake: Artist, Poet and Visionary, with Andrew Graham-Dixon and John Higgs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But he's almost like a map for the novels of Dickens. I mean, that will be Dickens' London novels. That's the world that they explore. It's changed, of course, because it's later, but that's, and the idea of going under the surface, I mean, it's Such an original Such an influential thinker and writer, I think.”
2024-06-11 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks – William Blake: Artist, Poet and Visionary, with Andrew Graham-Dixon and John Higgs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Most through midnight street, so I hear how the youthful harlot's curse blasts the newborn infant's tear and blights with plagues the marriage hearse. I mean that's London as the wasteland And it's also Blake walking always walking never in a coach or a carriage always on foot He's like the anticipation of a Baudelaire flanur, you know that great passage in Baudelaire go to the city with at that hour when it's no longer night nor day and see what you see and write about it make poetry about it that's the truth of the city Blake's there 100 years earlier well not quite 100 years earlier but 60 years earlier I just think it's such an astonishing piece of work and that's without that's without the picture which lends this whole other aspect to it”
2024-06-11 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks – William Blake: Artist, Poet and Visionary, with Andrew Graham-Dixon and John Higgs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you read that poetry, it has got the force of revolution in it. It is ominous. It's one of the most ominous poems. I think it influenced Eliot's wasteland, and I think it's like, to me, it's almost like reading the wasteland written by William Blake before Elliot wrote The Wasteland. I wander through each chartered street near where the chartered Thames does flow, and mark in every face I meet marks of weakness, marks of woe, in every cry of every man, in every infant's cry of fear, in every voice, in every ban, the mind forged manacles I hear, how the chimney sweepers cry every blackening church aballs, and the hapless soldiers sigh runs in blood down palace walls.”
2024-06-11 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks – William Blake: Artist, Poet and Visionary, with Andrew Graham-Dixon and John Higgs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I do love the tiger. I mean, I think 1789, 1794, what do those years make us think about? And he's written this child's poem, as you say, has this driving, astonishing rhythm. It's got this sort of power of the Old Testament about it. And what's it expressing? You can feel coursing through it, this poem on this little piece of paper made by little William Blake and his little house in London. And it's actually got the revolution in it. It's got all the revolutions of the 19th century in it, as well as the French Revolution. It's all somehow there. I've chosen a poem called London because I think that...”
2024-06-11 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks – William Blake: Artist, Poet and Visionary, with Andrew Graham-Dixon and John Higgs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. I think in a sense they are the perfect example of an image that was a dual image just for everyone, not just for Blank. I wondered if that might be the smile. Maybe it's tomorrow.”
2024-06-11 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks – William Blake: Artist, Poet and Visionary, with Andrew Graham-Dixon and John Higgs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Poised between death and redemption, a sort of symbol of each of these things. And on May the 1st of every year, the chimney sweeps were these little black children were the lords of London. They were all set free and everyone had to give them presents and gifts and they would mount a procession and they would crown this sort of figure that was a green man. They would erect it in the middle of London and there was this sort of celebration that the chimney sweeps who represented this eternal life of death were then made responsible on that one day for the idea of regeneration and renewal and the new year and the new summer and the new everything.”
2024-06-11 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks – William Blake: Artist, Poet and Visionary, with Andrew Graham-Dixon and John Higgs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It involved learning how to write backwards mirror. You had to mirror everything. It was incredibly, but for Blake, if he wanted to produce that work, he was quite prepared to learn that technique. But you can see why it didn't quite catch on. I think it's interesting on the chimney sweep that I. The chimney sweep in Georgian and Victorian London was a figure”
2024-06-11 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks – William Blake: Artist, Poet and Visionary, with Andrew Graham-Dixon and John Higgs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What makes it Typically Romantic and British Because that's the other side of the Reformation. When you destroy an entire art tradition, you also destroy all the teachers, all the studios, all the workshops. So by the time you get to the mid-18th century in Paris, everybody knows and everybody paints in exactly the same way. They all do it in the same way. Here, nobody has got a clue. Reynolds doesn't know. He buys paintings by Titian and destroys them to try and find out how to paint. None of them have a clue. Fuseley can't paint. The pictures look like clotted cream. Reynolds doesn't, you know, none of them do. Turner teaches himself, constable teaches himself. It's an entirely self-tort tradition, which is great for romanticism because it's all about originality. So they haven't got to overcome the disadvantage of Paujac-Louis David, who knows how to paint like a god from the age of 20. But Blake is really typical of that, this little cottage industry aspect. They're all cottage industry people. I mean, Constable goes off to the star again. He's pissed off with the Royal Academy because no one can teach him. So he goes off.”
2024-06-11 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks – William Blake: Artist, Poet and Visionary, with Andrew Graham-Dixon and John Higgs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But he's very prescient in the sense that people sometimes put him as a bit of an outsider because his stuff is so weird and handmade and idiosyncratic.”
2024-06-11 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks – William Blake: Artist, Poet and Visionary, with Andrew Graham-Dixon and John Higgs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That Picasso is making there couldn't have really been done without people like Rousseau and Blake before elevating childlike sensitivity. And I suppose the Songs of Innocence is a beautiful example of that, although it's not exactly, you know, it's a very knowing version of what child's vision is.”
2024-06-11 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks – William Blake: Artist, Poet and Visionary, with Andrew Graham-Dixon and John Higgs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, well, Palmer was deeply influenced by Blake and Henry Fuseley. I think Henry Fuseley wrote about, I think he said Blake's figures look as though they've been electrified. They shiver like lightning bolts. They don't look like flesh. They look like spirit made visible. He was a fantastic writer. He was probably better than he was a painter. The idea of vision, I mean, you know, he has so many connections. I mean, his idolization of childhood and his fascination with childhood, in a sense, he's a kind of English Rousseau, that the child's sense of imagination, it's an idea that goes through all the way to Picasso. He says Picasso says I could paint like Raphael when I was 17, but what I really want to be able to do is make pictures like I made them when I was five. In a sense, that revolution...”
2024-06-11 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks – William Blake: Artist, Poet and Visionary, with Andrew Graham-Dixon and John Higgs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I mean, he's actually animated by the same dream as Reynolds, but he's doing it in a I think a lot of these artists, there's a whole, I mean, it was the subject of my doctoral thesis, which I never finished, was those artists haunted by this Reynolds idea. And Blake would have been part of that. But I never wrote it, but I'm sure that this is the fellow feeling between all of them. And in that, Reynolds is the traitor. So it's not that Blake isn't part of it at all. It's more complicated. He's part of it, but he's an angry part of it.”
2024-06-11 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks – William Blake: Artist, Poet and Visionary, with Andrew Graham-Dixon and John Higgs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thing is, Blake, Blake is responding to the same thing that Reynolds is responding to. What they're responding to ultimately is the trauma of the Reformation. All of these people know, and they still feel the scar in a way that we don't, that just 200 years before, you know, 17 million works of art have been destroyed in this country. The entire tradition of sculpture and painting has essentially been destroyed in this country. It's all been smashed. It's all gone. And you go to Italy and you think, Crikey, they haven't destroyed it here. What have we lost? Blake in his little room making his little pictures, filling book after book. I mean, and his pictures even look like A4 or quarto-sized versions of the Sistine Chapel in detail, especially the Last Judgment, you know, the wriggling figures, the masses of figures.”
2024-06-11 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks – William Blake: Artist, Poet and Visionary, with Andrew Graham-Dixon and John Higgs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Famous texts, which is the series of annotations that he writes in the margin of his own copy of Reynolds's discourses, where he says, this man is a lie, this man was fired to depress art, this man is a fraud. But it's exactly, in a way, it's exactly the same as what you were saying, whether you choose Newton or did you choose imagination. Reynolds had chosen imagination, but he hadn't followed through with it. So he was almost worse in Blake's mind. And I think it's a little snapshot of Blake, but I think it's for me it's one of the most revealing moments in his career of many episodes. The fact that he should have taken poor old James Barry's side, because not many people did, frankly.”
2024-06-11 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks – William Blake: Artist, Poet and Visionary, with Andrew Graham-Dixon and John Higgs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Students to paint like Michelangelo, and yet, what does Reynolds himself do? He paints portraits for the aristocracy. So he is the perfect example of a man who doesn't practice what he preaches. Among the people who listened to Reynolds and think, I must go and paint like Michelangelo is an Irish Republican rebel called James Barry, who's this fantastic character who sets out, you know, he says, how can I paint the Sistine Chapel? He manages to get a commission at the Royal Society of Arts, and he paints these huge pictures which are still here in the centre of London, which were his attempt to kind of give us Michelangelo, because there's no patronage. The church is Protestant. They're not going to commission it. The aristocracy aren't going to commission it. So he does it. And then he gets no money. He works for years and years and years. He completely falls into poverty. And he turns up at the Royal Academy. He listens to Reynolds' lectures and shouts at him and starts. He's the only man ever to be expelled from the Royal Academy for bad behavior. He shouts. He says, you're a hypocrite, you're a fraud. And Blake takes his side. And that's taking of his side is what's behind one of Blake's most”
2024-06-11 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks – William Blake: Artist, Poet and Visionary, with Andrew Graham-Dixon and John Higgs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Deeper theological argument is somewhere behind William Blake because he knows that this is the great argument and it's who we put in authority over us whether we put reason up there or whether we put imagination whether we put science and so on for him it's very much about these oppositions and that's why I think when it comes to authority and the establishment which at that period of history meant essentially in the visual arts it meant the Royal Academy, he's on the side of the rebels. So you have Joshua Reynolds and Joshua Reynolds is telling all his young students Reynolds has been to Rome and Reynolds is actually a fantastic romantic he's seen the blazing light he's seen the color he's seen it all it's called the Sistine Chapel and he idolizes Michelangelo and he tells”
2024-06-11 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks – William Blake: Artist, Poet and Visionary, with Andrew Graham-Dixon and John Higgs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He did. So I was just thinking that what John's made me think about is actually what I'm writing about myself at the moment in my book about Vermeer. I'm writing about the competing notions of God that people argued over in Vermeers and Rembrandt's Holland. And it's a very Blakeian opposition. On the one hand, you have the Calvinists who say that there's this God who's determined absolutely everything and there is no room for people to change their destiny in any way. You are saved from the beginning of time or you are damned from the beginning. Nothing you can do. There is no freedom. And on the other hand, there are these other people who are libertarian, pacifists, most of them are artists, poets saying we don't see that God, we don't recognize that God. Our God gives us freedom. He has absolute power, but he relaxes it. He gives us imagination. He gives us freedom. This is why we are a republic. This is why we are Holland. And I think that at some level that...”
2024-06-11 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks – William Blake: Artist, Poet and Visionary, with Andrew Graham-Dixon and John Higgs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, he certainly would not want to be venerated. He would want the imagination to be venerated. And he would see that quality in everyone. And so it's kind of right that there isn't any statues of Blake in London, like statues on a plinth that you look up to. What you see increasingly, such as at Primrose Hill or at Bunhill Fields, people have carved his words into the ground, into the stone. That feels much more apt to me.”
2024-06-11 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks – William Blake: Artist, Poet and Visionary, with Andrew Graham-Dixon and John Higgs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Such a deep image, and the Tate exhibition, you could bite it on a cushion, on a big stuffed cushion. How could you, having that in your living room, you just spend so long on Wakelet, so you wouldn't be able to do anything else with a cushion like that in your room?”
2024-06-11 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks – William Blake: Artist, Poet and Visionary, with Andrew Graham-Dixon and John Higgs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I kind of think that is Blake. Blake is a coming man. A Blake who's going to be more important to us in the future than he has been in the past. And a man that the more we learn about, the better our quality of lives become, which is quite a bold statement, but that's who Blake is for me.”
2024-06-11 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks – William Blake: Artist, Poet and Visionary, with Andrew Graham-Dixon and John Higgs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's kind of funny? So there's an element of Blake that we're catching up with. And for me, I think of Blake as a coming man. I think we're kind of catching up to him. We're not quite there yet, but we're getting there. And the more we learn about him, the more he sort of makes sense. So I love the picture Albion Rose, which to answer the question of who is Blake, I wanted to choose this. Now, It's debated whether or not it's a self-portrait, the time it was done, 1795, the same time as this edition of the book, apparently his hair was a bit like that, but we only have older pictures of it. Yeah, for me, it's certainly a spiritual self portrait. But unlike the ancients of days who was blind to that blazing light behind him, this figure is aware of that light. And it is just animating momentum.”
2024-06-11 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks – William Blake: Artist, Poet and Visionary, with Andrew Graham-Dixon and John Higgs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Blake, that figure was a little satanic. And in fact, he does say Eurizen is Satan. And yet in 2019 on St. Paul's Cathedral, they projected that image onto the dome and animated it. And it looked amazing for the Tate exhibit The fact that this great heart of British Christianity. Satan projected”
2024-06-11 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks – William Blake: Artist, Poet and Visionary, with Andrew Graham-Dixon and John Higgs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the context that it comes from in the preface to Milton really changes it. But yeah, but in the ancient of days, which is again another depiction of this rational left brain side of this figure, Eurizin. And he sort of leaning out of this great void with a pair of golden compasses sort of marking out the world. He thinks because he's creating this world that he's the god of it. He's missing that there's a blazing spiritual sun behind him, which in Blake's mythology would be the imagination. That's the divine aspect of our world. And he can't see it. And because he can't see it, he's delusional thinking. And because he's missing that”
2024-06-11 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks – William Blake: Artist, Poet and Visionary, with Andrew Graham-Dixon and John Higgs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Missing so much. And when you then look at Eduardo Plazos sculpture based on this, it's a wonderful thing, but it's Everything that Newton can see is missing. And the fact that it's placed in the courtyard of the British Library, a great temple to book learning, to that rational side of us, you kind of think. Kind of missed the point there. They kind of not quite got it. They've recognized something wonderful, but they've missed part of it. And it happens again in one of his most famous works. I was wanted to ask you, don't you think that's also what happens with Jerusalem? Every time I hear Jerusalem, it's like, well, the answer to each one of those rhetorical questions is no. And yet everybody's going.”
2024-06-11 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks – William Blake: Artist, Poet and Visionary, with Andrew Graham-Dixon and John Higgs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The extent to which the country hasn't come to sort of support this building. And it's totemic of the way that... Even though Blake is revered, he's not quite fully understood. His Newton is a good example of this. One of his probably his most famous images, you've got Isaac Newton. It kind of looks like an underwater world. It's like coral or something like that. He's not wet and his paper's not wet. He's in this strange organic void or cosmos, but he can't see it. He's just totally focused on marking out this sort of rational finite symbol. And it's that part of our brain, that rational side of our brain, which Blake referred to as a character called Urazin, which is what he's depicting here. It's limited. It's small and it's limited. Let's not say he's mocking it. He's not mocking Newton. He's still portrayed like, you know, a Greek god. He's profoundly important. But he's just...”
2024-06-11 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks – William Blake: Artist, Poet and Visionary, with Andrew Graham-Dixon and John Higgs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sung by the English cricket team. It's sung by the Women's Institute. It's sung by the Tory party at the conference. It's sung by the Labour Party at the conference. It's for everyone. And you see it at like the last night of the Proms, at this height of sort of patriotic flag-waving establishment acceptance. And Blake's there. And yet at the same time, if you look at, say, Blake's cottage down in Feltham, where he started the words that became the hymn Jerusalem, where he defined this land as this green and present land, it utterly central part of our national identity. You'd expect a cottage like this to be preserved, to be an artistic centre, a place where people can visit and learn about Blake and things like that. And inside, it's supported by scaffolding. It's close to a ruin. It's kind of shocking.”
2024-06-11 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks – William Blake: Artist, Poet and Visionary, with Andrew Graham-Dixon and John Higgs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Original composition, especially for 1805. You know, you've never really quite seen anything like it. And when you see the work like this, you realize this is a genius who is showing you something that no one else could possibly begin to show. And he is brilliant. And because he's brilliant, he's For me, incredibly central to our sense of identity on national, particularly an English sort of sense of identity. So with something like the words to him Jerusalem,”
2024-06-11 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks – William Blake: Artist, Poet and Visionary, with Andrew Graham-Dixon and John Higgs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As everyone has been saying, he's not the easiest person to pigeon To call him a poet, but he's too great an artist to be just a poet. You want to call him an artist, but he's too great a poet. He often gets called a mystic, but he was too much a grafter, a working man, a hardworking engraver. I think you just have to go with visionary because he was a visionary from a small child to the end of his days he was seeing visions and they became the basis of his work. In the modern world, we're not quite comfortable with how to react to that. But when you see his work, Kind of go, oh, it's real. I get that. You know, he's clearly seeing a different world than I am. As an example, the painting David delivered out of many waters. I could have chosen many for this, but it's a personal favorite. But it's just such...”
2024-06-11 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks – William Blake: Artist, Poet and Visionary, with Andrew Graham-Dixon and John Higgs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“you know what's it in a square what's it you know that they'll cleave to blake because he shows that you can you can do this and you can bring it off and some of the richest results can be when you just you know don't follow the rules don't follow a category”
2024-06-11 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks – William Blake: Artist, Poet and Visionary, with Andrew Graham-Dixon and John Higgs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think he's a wonderful example of somebody who crosses all the boundaries as academic specialization has increased and increased. It seems like as though people, either you're a word person or you're an image person, you're a historian or you're a philosopher. Blake is everything. And that's what's fantastic about this book, for example. I mean, this book that we're looking at. It's a work of philosophy, it's a work of social commentary, but it's also a work of art and it's a great work of literature. And I think in that sense, Blake is a tremendous inspiration. And he can be an inspiration to people who don't want to fit into a particular anyone who feels like they're”
2024-06-11 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks – William Blake: Artist, Poet and Visionary, with Andrew Graham-Dixon and John Higgs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I think he's increasingly revered, but there's still wariness around him. There's people, they see his work, they feel drawn to it, but there's a sense that if they get too deep, they might not quite be the same afterwards. They might have the realization that, oh, he's not mad. He could change your worldview, which he absolutely will. And we resist that. And I think there's an element about Blake that people are a little bit scared of still, despite the fact that as we get to know him more and understand his work more and as it sinks into British culture and culture more, he becomes more important, more present. But we still just...”
2024-06-11 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks – William Blake: Artist, Poet and Visionary, with Andrew Graham-Dixon and John Higgs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT