Ruin Lust at the Tate Britain

The first room in the Ruin Lust exhibition at the Tate Britain was sparsely populated with paintings. But each provided a key to themes which would be explored in subsequent rooms. They also gave some idea as to the range of subject matter, style and historical span which we could expect. John Martin’s The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum confronted us with the process of ruination in full epic widescreen. As in any disaster film, the pleasurable terrors of natural cataclysm visited upon the grand edifices of human civilisation in its fullest flowering are gleefully exploited. Figures fleeing in the foreground are overwhelmed by the rivers of bubbling magma and furious rain of burning rock plummeting from the sky. Even tinier figures in the middle distance have probably had it, no-name extras hired to scream and be anonymously buried or swallowed up by the roiling and rifting landscape.

This aestheticisation of disaster, offered up as thrilling spectacle, is later reflected upon in the dark photographic prints of Tacita Dean. The title of the series included here, The Russian Ending, directly invokes the cinematic quality of such images. It refers to the alternate cuts of films which distributors produced for Finnish and Russian markets. The latter emphasised more fatalistic, doom-laden conclusions, which they evidently thought would suit the Russian mindset. Dean’s beautifully reproduced images of shipwrecks, polluted cityscapes, battlefields strewn with the shells of bombed out vehicles and, indeed, erupting volcanoes are shaded in a sooty chiaroscuro, as if they were ingrained with smoke and ashes. Scrawled descriptions over various elements of the scene add to the impression that these are directed disasters, carefully staged and photographed for the pleasure of the viewer.

Rachel Whiteread also capture the moment of destruction, of ruination, in her series of photographs of high-rise estates being detonated. The titles include lengthy addresses, including postcodes. There are shots of the buildings in an intact state at the time at which they were condemned. They are like pre-ruins, the undocumented time inbetween a steady decline towards final dramatic collapse in dynamite clap and brick dust cloud.

Back in the introductory atrium, Jane and Louise Wilson’s Azeville (2006) and The Aftermath are large black photographs in which massive concrete bunkers, remnants of wars and occupations, fill the frame with brooding, ominous intensity. They are linear cliffs and outcrops, geometrically sheared formations which seem to form new landscape features. The incursions of nature into these man-made structures, in the guise of weathering, the drifting of sand, the mottling of moss and lichen, and the fringing of grass and weeds, begins to blur the boundaries between the natural and the artificial. They are like blocks of frozen time, deposits left by a particular historical moment. Despite their apparent indestructible solidity, they are themselves subject, as is everything, to the processes of time.

Paul Nash - Equivalents for Megaliths

Other artists also explore the congruence of the natural landscape with monumental human constructions. The works in the section titled On Land (presumably a reference to Brian Eno’s ambient evocation of fogbound landscapes) conjure up the spirit of place, the absorption of the marks of human history and presence into the contours of the land. Such marks respond to the landscape even as they shape it. Nature always triumphs in the end, steadily growing over and covering human endeavours to hold the cyclical processes of growth and decay at bay. Ruin and disaster create a borderland in which civilisation and the wild reconnect with each other amongst the rubble. The ancient landscapes of the south are invoked in Paul Nash’s Equivalents for Megaliths and Pillar and Moon. The surreal transformation of the harvest fields in the former suggests and affinity between the human imagination and certain landscapes, a profound sense of connection and attachment. Megalithic stone is here replaced with less substantial grids and rolls, suggestive of geometrical harvest stacks. They look like ideal forms, plans waiting to be given substance with the appropriate material. They are templates for the shapes and objects appropriate for a particular place and time, whether that be harvest stacks or sarsen stones. The harvested shapes will decay much more quickly, or be summarily dismantled. Time for these equivalents is considerably more constricted. The stone globe topping the wall pillar in the latter painting echoes the moon’s sphere in the sky above. The built landscape and the natural cycles are linked, the ruinous processes of time once more invoked. Time is inherent in both paintings: seasonal time, historical time and geological time. Megalithic sites have become so much a part of the British landscape, permanently inscribed onto the contours of OS maps, that they appear as an expression of it; Ruins which have come to seem like expressive natural outcroppings of the land.

Joe Tilson also uses the ancient landscape of southern Britain as the basis of his Wessex Portfolio series. With their stacked arrays of photographs and graphic images, associatively linking into boldly iconographic representations of Stonehenge, Cerne Abbas, Silbury Hill, the White Horse of Uffington, Avebury and Glastonbury, these attempt to codify the power of these sites. Details such as spiral patterns (the inwardly coiling pathways of the brain), sketches of archaeological finds, starry backdrops and drawings of moths and bees give a particularity which contrasts with the specific view, focussing inward or beyond and bringing individual vision or universal perspective to bear. As a whole, they offer some kind of diagrammatic distillation of the affective spell of these places. They have gone beyond the notion of the ruin and have become part of a collective inner landscape, one where the distinction between the natural and the artificial has been almost wholly dispelled.

Paul Nash - The Fertile Image (with Monster Field on the cover)

Paul Nash further explores the surreal quality of the southern English landscape, and the presence of man within it, in a series of his photographs included here (some of which were also published in his 1951 book Fertile Image). Human artefacts and tools become strange and purposelessly abstract when stranded and abandoned within natural surrounds, or within wilds which have grown up around them. They become markers of boundary zones between the wild and the domestic, exterior and interior worlds. Iron Post, Bedhead and Stone Wall in particular points to the borders of unconscious dreamworlds with its particular assemblage. A garden roller is a potent symbol in its ruinous, rusted state. A tool intended to control and tame wild nature, it is now subject to its erosive forces. Nash’s fallen tree monsters indicate the ways in which ruinous natural forms arouse the active and alert imagination.

John Sell Cotman - Llanthony Abbey

Paintings of picturesque ruin often fixed upon the shattered shells of monasteries as their objects of fascination. Llanthony Abbey in Wales, set with a lush river valley, was a particular favourite, and views by Turner, John Sell Cottman and Joseph Clarendon Smith were included here. Leafy branch and vine cover patches of crumbling masonry, both furthering its eventual disintegration and helping in the short term to bind sections of wall together. The passage of time and history is made manifest and the irrevocable triumph of nature over civilisation is evoked. Abbeys were subject to deliberate ruination during the Reformation, and stand as symbols of the fragility of human ideas, beliefs and social and political structures. No matter how fixed and unassailable they might appear at any given moment, they will eventually fall.

Elswhere, the idea of the picturesque and the mystical sense of identity attached to the British landscape, along with the dreamy and uncritical veneration which it can arouse, are satirised. Keith Arnatt uses the acronym AONB (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty) with maximal irony in his series of photographs from 1982-4. He studiously avoids picturesque scenes, seeking out what lies behind or just beyond such carefully framed compositions. The workings behind the stage sets, so to speak. His countryside is grubbily mundane and poverty-worn. Human incursions into the natural world are not depicted as harmonious or romantic. They are despoliations, falling into a ruinous and rubbish strewn state which no one is likely to linger and admire.

John Latham’s Five Sisters Bing (1976) is a highly artificial landscape whose pyramidally peaked mountain range is formed of leather-bound books whose covers are redolent of classic literature, and whose bedrock is a bound edition of a year’s copies of The Times. An establishment landscape to be imposed on the spoil mountains left by departed industry. The very idea of a monument, for which this was a proposal, is mocked, the motives for its construction viewed with the greatest suspicion. David Shrigley, meanwhile, erects an instant prefab mini-leisure centre on the site of demolished Victorian housing, an amusing satire on reflexive 'redevelopment'. There is a serious point beneath the surface titters. Organised leisure will be the new currency in this street where people once organised their own communal activities.

Graham Sutherland - Devastation 1941: East End, Burnt Paper Warehouse

War is a time of rupture and upheaval, and creates its own instant overnight ruins. The shock of familiar buildings and cityscapes transformed with such sudden violence provokes an effect of surreal dislocation. British artists of a surrealist bent adapted their eye for strange and psychologically resonant transformations and realignments of the normal world and trained it on scenes in which that safe normality had been savagely blown apart. Surrealism during wartime becomes closer to realism, the surrealist’s attraction towards destruction guiltily fulfilled. Graham Sutherland, in his Devastation 1941: East End, Burnt Paper Warehouse, finds his characteristic fusion of natural and mechanical forms in the exposed rolls of paper. Stacked on top of one another and exposed to the elements, they look like the stripped trunks of felled trees mournfully laid out amongst broken machinery. In Muirhead Bone’s Torpedoed Oil Tanker (1940), the gargantuan vessel resembles a beached leviathan, the efflorescent rent in the side a killing wound. Metal has been bent and flayed, peeled back like hard, leathery skin. In John Armstrong’s Coggeshall Church, Essex (1940), bomb damage to the tower has revealed a structural cross-section, as if we were looking at an architectural illustration. The damage here is very neat and precise. It could almost be a part of an act of reconstruction rather than destruction. John Piper’s St Mary le Port, Bristol records the jagged masonry bones of one of the city’s churches in much the same way as he painted the ruins of country mansions. Another Paul Nash photograph, taken at the Cowley Dump in Oxfordshire in 1940, gazes upon a cresting slope of wrecked airplane husks and dismembered parts. It form the basis for what is probably his best-known Second World War painting, which found him in full-blown surrealist mode: Totes Meer (Dead Sea) of 1941. The jumbled assemblage of aircraft parts displays an angular modernist fragmentation, here recorded as observed reality rather than formal abstraction, however. It looks like the result of a monstrous collision. The twisted metal precariously piled up in grinding disarray is darkly radiant with the violent spirit of death and destruction; that of the planes, their crews and of the destruction which they in turn had wrought. It is an instant, discomforting and unheroic monument.

John Constable - Sketch for Hadleigh Castle

The last of the introductory pictures in the exhibition’s atrium was John Constable’s Sketch for Hadleigh Castle. The ruin here is stridently Romantic, a lonely tower under rainswept skies by a storm-troubled sea. The unfinished nature of the picture gives it a rough form which proves entirely apposite for the mood of the scene. Though never intended to be viewed as a work in itself, it is nevertheless unconsciously modern in approach. It anticipates the way in which other works in the exhibition convey a ruinous aspect through rough, unrefined form; compositions left deliberately ragged around the edges, dissolving or thickening into semi-abstraction. JMW Turner also anticipates modern styles in his watercolour study Holy Island Cathedral. The ruined arch emerges from hazy and watery blue surrounds like some sunken Ys rising from the depths. We can imagine the picture accompanied by the tolling of Debussy’s La Cathédrale Engloutie. Turner’s Temple of Poseidon is another Romantic clifftop ruin of the imagination. Its tempestuous roughness and noisy drama, with violent clouds gathering, stabbed through by a gash of lightning, has none of the classical equanimity its title might suggest. The gathering storm suggests that the process of ruination is ongoing, and the dogs howling out across the building waves mourn for their lost master.

JMW Turner - Holy Island

John Piper’s paintings of dilapidated country houses often have the look of collages, or broadly outlined stage sets. Flat masses of masonry facades are set off against highly contrasted backgrounds, the muted or darkly burnished colours suggesting burnt surfaces or age-accumulated patinas of lichen or moss. They are evocative backdrops in front of which stylised and fancifully costumed masques seem designed to unfold. The Forum (1961) sees him adopting the subject matter of the classical Roman ruin. He pushes the composition towards abstraction with splashes, dabs, dashed strokes and tangles of scraped swirl. Shapes suggestive of classical architectural form rise from or are imposed upon this chaos, remains of the old city amongst rubble and scrubby growth.

Leon Kossoff - Demolition of the Old House Dalston Road 1974

Leon Kossoff’s Demolition of the Old House Dalston Road 1974 is almost topographical in its roughness of form. Paint is built up in thick layers like dried ridges of mud. The picture could almost have been created from the mixed dust and debris of the site it depicts. Scores in the paint further the sense of geological formations, resembling weather cracking beginning to shear and fragment the surface. It’s a cousin to Frank Auerbach’s Maples Demolition Euston Road, painted in 1960, and which employs a similarly thick layering of paint to create a gnarled and glutinous dimensionality. Laura Oldfield Ford’s meticulously drafted depictions of post-war housing estates and their boundaries are smeared with blurred washes of pink in what at first appears a deliberate act of vandalism. These translucent surface blemishes resemble marks of attempted erasure, the traces left on walls after graffiti has been washed off. But scrawled screeds stubbornly remain written across areas of the paintings, commentaries, observations and clouds of drifting thought and emotion made manifest. The writing on the paintings is not defacement, rather it is an attempt at giving the local spirit expression.

In the case of Tacita Dean’s film Kodak, the medium is in itself the substance of ruin, or of the abandonment which presages ruin. It documents an ending, a moment of historical and cultural transition. These are the final days of the Kodak film manufacturing plant, and part of Dean’s film is printed on the last black and white 16mm stock to be produced there. It thus becomes a record of its own obsolescence and disappearance, a last spectral testament. The beauty of the images make this a melancholy farewell, an elegy to the passing of a particular form of vision from the world.

Piranesi - Pyramid of Gaius Cestius

The first pictures greeting the visitor as they entered the main body of the exhibition weren’t by British artists, and therefore seemed set a little apart. They were essentially more introductory works, prefatory images which primed us further for what was to come. They were two of Piranesi’s prints of Rome. They were placed by the entrance to the first room because of their formative influence on the development of an aesthetic appreciation of ruins. The 18th century Views of Rome depict the classical buildings in a detailed and clearly delineated fashion, outlines boldly etched and impressed on the paper with black ink. They bring a sense of solidity to the cracked, crumbling and vine-blotched masses of the Colosseum (1760-78) and the Pyramid of Gaius Cestius (1755). A degree of classical order and proportion is maintained, but tempered with the disorder of ruination and the reintroduction of a nature formerly held firmly at bay. There is a state of balance in place, but it is temporary. The Piranesi etchings set the templates for visions of cities and civilisations decaying and passing away, leaving evocatively empty shells to spark the curiosity of future travellers who look upon them.

Gustave Doré - The New Zealander

There was a subset of pictures here which imagined the abandoned ruins of futurity. These are the cityscapes of post-catastrophe science fiction which have fascinated writers, artists and, latterly, film-makers from the Romantic period onwards. In 1872, Gustave Doré provided dark and richly atmospheric engravings for London: A Pilgrimage, a travel book written by Blanchard Jerrold. The final plate is called The New Zealander. It depicts the future wanderer seated on a chunk of masonry from the collapsed London Bridge on the south side of the river, looking across at the ruins of the city. The dome of St Paul’s has collapsed inward; the cracked or fallen dome is a commonplace in depictions of future ruin. As an overarching symbol of ordered and classical civilisation and achievement, it is the perfect subject for significant destruction and continued disrepair. Jerrold locates the source of the imaginary scene in ‘Macaulay’s dream of the far future, with the tourist New Zealander upon the broken parapets, contemplating something matching “the glory that was Greece – the grandeur that was Rome”’. Thomas ‘Lord’ Macaulay’s quote about the New Zealander was instantly familiar to many at the time. At the conclusion to a book review in an 1840 edition of the Edinburgh Review, he had contemplated the continuation of Roman civilisation (the book in question was a History of the Popes) and the fall of the post-Reformation English protestant society. It was in such a context that he dreamed of a time when ‘some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's'. It was an image which caught the imagination of the reading public, long after the substance of the review was forgotten, and was widely, even profligately cited. The New Zealander became a byword for a future observer of fallen London. Doré’s print looked forward to look back to Piranesi’s etchings of Rome.

Joseph Michael Gandy - An Imagined View of the Bank of England in Ruins

Future ruination or abandonment became a part of a number of works of fiction in the 19th century as the industrialised city exploded outward and swallowed people up wholesale with a smoky belch. There was an element of wish-fulfilment in Richard Jeffries’ After London, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, William Morris’ News from Nowhere, H.G.Wells’ The Time Machine (with its emblematic scene set in a crumbling future museum), and M.P.Shiel’s 1901 novel The Purple Cloud. The destruction of the new polluted, overpopulated cities offered the possibility of new beginnings, the envisaging of a wholesale change of direction. When the architect John Soane designed his classically solid and rational Bank of England buildings, he commissioned the artist Joseph Gandy to depict them as future ruins, his domes and ceilings cracked and holed, letting in the elements to complete the levelling. It was an act of humility in a profession which can easily breed megalomaniac vision and vaulted hubris. But it also acknowledged the impermanence of the civilisation for which this symbolically massive and imposing structure served as a modern temple. This too shall pass, he seems to be saying, as the same time recognising the transience of his existence and the eventual disappearance of all the ideas and endeavours which made up and gave purpose to his lifetime. Perhaps it was this melancholy awareness that led him to collect, hoard and catalogue so many pieces of ruined masonry and statuary. He filled every nook and purpose-built shelf of his London house with them until he was effectively living in a crowded museum of his own curation. The house really is a museum now, and an utterly bewitching one at that, particularly as dusk draws in.

James Boswell - The Fall of London: The Horseguard

James Boswell’s The Fall of London (1933) is a series of smokily smudged black and white lithographs depicting the fight for the city during a fascist invasion. It gives alarming substance to the fears (or for some, the hopes) arising from the spread of fascism across the continent. They are a contemporary variant on the tales of German invasion which were widespread during the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, the best known of which is George Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking. A collection of these stories was gathered together by Michael Moorcock in the 1977 anthology England Invaded, which includes Blyde Mudersnook’s 1911 Strand tale When the New Zealander Comes – a fulfilment of Macaulay’s prophetic imagining. Boswell’s stark, graphically striking images are startling bleak. Human beings are reduced to ragdoll figures cast broken-limbed onto piles of rubble or hung crook-necked from lampposts, scuttling, crablike creatures in armoured carapaces, pointed guns like gesticulating claws, or fearful shadow runners, hunched, tensed and showing a flash of a face alert with blank paranoia. They are vaguely reminiscent of David Lloyd’s artwork for Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta (the monochrome version as originally published in Warrior comic), for which these lithographs could be viewed as a prelude in 8 snapshots.

Visions of the future themselves become outmoded and redundant, and looking back on them is like contemplating the ruins of futures past. This is what Gerard Byrne does in his video piece 1984 and Beyond, which restages a 1963 discussion between 12 science fiction writers, the results of which were published in Playboy. They attempted between them to envisage possible futures. The writers involved were among the cream of the 50s generation who prided themselves on their awareness of the social and political currents of the time. They were pulp philosophers possessed of varying degrees of insight. Some of their ideas are interesting, some are definitely of their time. The writers in question were Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, William Tenn, A.E.Van Vogt, Algis Budrys, Theodore Sturgeon (one of the more liberal members of this group), Frederik Pohl, Rod Serling (the Twilight Zone writer and producer), James Blish (who had a rare intellectual rigour) and Poul Anderson. There is a faded nostalgia inherent in such a resurrection of old dreams. A yearning ache for a time when the future was an exciting prospect, full of rapidly expanding and seemingly limitless utopian potential; a future which could be born from the minds of a convocation of pipe smoking science fiction writers.

The works in the final room, Cities in Dust, drive the nails into the coffin of any such post-war utopian dreams of shining ziggurats and coiling skyways. John Riddy’s London (Weston Street) from 2008 focuses on an expanse of brickwork under a railway bridge. It seems to contain a chronicle of London’s steady decay from the mid-Victorian era onwards, written in the gradations of grime, weathering and mould, as accurately decipherable as the rings in a tree or the strata on an exposed rockface. The agit-prop art group Inventory find the decline of post-war social ideals symbolised by the worn, peeling surface of a South London housing estate map sign. They wrote their own response onto it, an angry palimpsest decrying the neglect which the ruinous map charts. Jon Savage’s Uninhabited London photos, taken between 1977-2008, view the city as a depopulated zone, abandoned by its populace, or perhaps evacuated by official mandate. It is devoid of apparent life. If there are people here, they have retreated behind their walls and are peering anxiously between the gaps in the curtains, like the protagonist in Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor. It’s a post-punk vision of future catastrophe now, with the city as imagined by Derek Jarman in Jubilee or by Michael Moorcock in various Jerry Cornelius stories.

Keith Coventry - Heygate Estate

Keith Coventry’s Heygate Estate (1995) redesigns the estate map as a piece of Russian constructivism, echoing the suprematist extremes of cold abstraction to which Kazimir Malevich pushed his paintings. It plots the birth and death of modernist ideals and approaches. There is an implicit criticism of the way in which human social and individual needs were abstracted and compacted to fit the mass housing projects of the post-war period. Just as the idealism of the Russian revolution descended into totalitarian control, so the ideals of modernist housing plans and their attendant social programs tended to devolve into failing systems of control. Coventry’s work serves as a fitting end point for the exhibition. The representations of ruins we have seen have largely been palpably physical. But ruins can equally be the rubble and wreckage of ideals, philosophies and once firmly held worldviews. The salutary lesson of the ruin is that nothing lasts, all is transient. It’s a knowledge which is melancholic, but which can also offer great comfort. Everything changes, everything is renewed. In this realisation lies the curious pleasure, lustful or not, of the ruin.

The Romantics at Tate Britain

Part Two - Inward Vision

William Blake - A Vision: The Inspiration of the Poet

Romanticism favoured the individual artist, attributing to them the power to see the world in a fresh and entirely unique fashion, to perceive the elemental nature which lay underneath surface appearances. They conveyed such insights in their own particular manner, which owed little or nothing to prevailing academic tastes and standards. The expression of subjective vision, rather than the mastery of an accepted style, was at the heart of Romanticism in the visual arts. The artist was now deemed to possess a special nature which set them apart from the common horde. Whether this was innate, cultivated or stoked aflame through artificial stimuli (opium being the chosen key to fevered dreams favoured by Coleridge and Thomas de Quincy), it left the mind open to dimensions beyond those readily perceptible to the senses. The imagination was all-important. Coleridge held it to be ‘the living power and prime Agent of all human Perception…A repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’.

The Romantics sought inspiration in nature, particularly in its wilder and more overwhelming forms (as mentioned in part one). This was partly an attempt to distance themselves from the ordered boundaries of civilisation, centred on the built-up surrounds of towns and cities. The love of the sublime landscape, the embrace of its dangerous allure, with its potential for engulfing those who gaze upon it, represented the Romantic imagination pushing at the limits of the outer world, pressing against the boundaries of physical being. In confronting the immensity of the sublime, the mountains, abysses and teeming waterfalls, the Romantic sought to see beyond, to catch a glimpse of the infinite. The solitude found in such settings, be they the Alps or the Lake District, also induced a contemplative state of mind which directed the imaginative gaze inward, down towards the depths of what would come to be known as the subconscious. Unpredictable, chaotic nature was a reflection of the irrational self. Alone in the wild places of the world, the Romantics saw themselves as part of the environment in which they stood. The inner landscape of the human mind contained immensities as sublime and mysterious as those which surrounded them. The philosophers and artists of The Enlightenment, the age of reason, believed that human nature could be understood through rational study (and, incidentally, could be moulded and directed as a result). The poet Alexander Pope provided a summary epigraph for the rationalist outlook with the line, from his ‘An Essay on Man’, stating that ‘The proper study of Mankind is Man’ (although the poem goes on to point out the meagre extent of true scientific knowledge). For the Romantics, reason was not the natural human state. They welcomed the ‘Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confus’d’, to which Pope referred, even if it did occasionally create the conditions for a descent into madness. The mind, for them, was a realm of unfathomable mystery rather a seat of reason, an undiscovered country which they set out to explore.

William Blake - The Man Who Taught Blake Painting in his Dreams

William Blake provided an unlikely figurehead for those who looked to chart the inner worlds of the Romantic imagination. If the artist was seen as possessing a special vision inherent in his or her nature, rather than being a conduit for divine inspiration, then he provided a rather contradictory example. He did believe himself to be receptive to direct inspiration from the spiritual emanations of inhuman beings. Reality as perceived by the senses was a material diminution of a higher and more unified level of creation from which these emanations descended, allowing him a glimpse into immaterial dimensions. Such visitations are acknowledged in several works displayed in the exhibition. The Man Who Taught Blake Painting In His Dreams portrays a man with a noble and benevolent face which seemingly divides into chitinous cranial plates. He looks rather like an uncharacteristically cheerful Klingon. The Inspiration of the Poet shows an open-ended room contained, like a huge hearthplace, at very rear end of a much larger and completely featureless room. Within this recessed sub-room, the poet sits writing at his desk, a single lamp providing a globe of illumination above his head. A white-robed figure stands at his side, pointing to his book as if dictating, or guiding his pen. The tiny room within a larger room can easily be seen as representing the deeper level of the mind to which Blake and the Romantics sought ingress. The Bard is a more specifically British expression of the spirit of inspiration. The poet of ancient days rests in the forest, the light of creative vision showering down upon him from the radiant figures, who hover above, illuminating the dark oak branches.

Blake may have believed that he received his inspiration from external sources, but they could also be regarded as reflecting inner states, externalised projections of the divided aspects of the soul, or psyche. He developed a personal mythological system of great complexity over the course of his lifetime, which centred on the divided state of man and creation, its fall from an original state of unity. The origins of this Gnostic worldview are drawn in The Book of Urizen, pages of which feature prominently here. Remarkably, these were discovered in the 1970s by someone who had bought an old railway timetable, and discovered eight Blake prints inserted between the pages, having perhaps been used as bookmarks for particularly interesting branch lines. As with all versions of Blake’s illuminated books, they are unique, each engraving having been hand-coloured. The illuminated books were completely integrated works of art, words and pictures intertwining and combining on the page to give a visionary cosmogony detail and concrete form. These particular pages also have Blake’s own titles for the pictures added as handwritten sub-headings in their lower margins. Urizen is his version of the Old Testament God, an aged, white-bearded figure who, tired of life, imposes the limitations of order, division and law upon the world. Within the divine unity of the universe, he fashions his own tomb of imprisoning matter. His fiery, creative aspect is sheared off and becomes the figure of Los, the embodiment of Energy and imagination. Urizen is left with the cold comfort of naked Reason, a detached rationalism with which he measures and bounds his new sub-creation.

William Blake - The Book of Urizen. Everything is an attempt to be Human

Plate 6 is subtitled ‘I sought pleasure and found a prison’, and depicts the moment of this first painful division. Los screams with round mouthed and eyed horror, clutching himself as if seeking comfort, or trying to cover the raw nakedness of his newborn self-awareness. He is surrounded by flames, matching his hair, which rise into the words of the poem. ‘Los wept howling round the dark Demon/And cursing his lot for in anguish/Urizen was rent from his side’. Plate 10 is subtitled ‘Everything is an attempt to be human’. A half-formed skeletal figure looks to the sky in anguish as it endures the pain of coming into being. A pair of manacles await at its bony feet, ready to tether it to the earth. These are the ‘mind-forged manacles’ familiar from Blake’s well-known poem The Tyger. This skeleton is the framework for the physical self into which Urizen is painfully condensing himself. Los lies dislocated to his side, a mirror-figure, sundered and frozen in shock. Los is the creative side of the spirit, the imagination abstracted, his emblem a hammer, tool of both artist and artisan. He appears here like a statue sculpted with the distorted features of horror and despair. It’s easy to see the influence of the gothic carvings and tomb effigies which Blake had sketched in Westminster Abbey in his youth. The tendrils of vines curl up amongst the lines of the poem, as if bearing words as fruit. They describe the growth of the body and the awakening of the senses in terms of landscape. ‘From the caverns of his jointed spine/Down sunk with fright a red/Round globe hot burning deep/Deep down into the Abyss’.

The Book of Urizen - The floods overwhelmed me

Plate 11 is subtitled ‘the floods overwhelmed me’. The picture stands alone on the page, with no accompanying verse. Urizen hangs in the void, suspended in emptiness as if he is floating in the middle of an ocean, with no sight of land on the horizon. His beard splays out around him, and his arms are spread out wide in passive surrender. He is like Christ or Odin, hung between heaven and earth (which has yet to be created). His eyes, nose and mouth, the new sensory organs which have just formed, are dead, blank holes. Blake describes him as being ‘In ghostly torment sick,/Hanging upon the wind,/Two nostrils bent down to the deep’. Plate 15 is again a picture with no accompanying words. It is subtitled ‘Vegetating in Fibres of Blood’. This is a remarkable vision of this new subcreation, which Urizen and, inadvertently, Los are forging, as an inseperable part of the human body. Los’ feelings of pity for Urizen cause further corporeal division and the distillation of a system of planetary bodies. The raw fibres of emotion pour off his back and join with the tumbling streams of his hair, hanging downward and covering the head which he holds despairingly between his hands. Los’ body, like that of Urizen, is depicted in terms of the Romantic landscape; inner and outer topography conjoined. ‘Life in cataracts poured down his cliffs/The void shrunk lymph into Nerves/Wandring wide on the bosom of night/And left a round globe of blood/Trembling upon the void’. A bloody planet ‘conglobes’ from the deliquescing matter of Los’ body; it could be a depiction of the early, roiling, red-hot days of the earth’s formation as the solar system was being drawn together. It’s an amazing blend of science fiction and mythology, reminding me of the way in which Roger Zelazny blended genre material with tales from the Hindu scriptures in his 1967 novel Lord of Light. Blake describes how ‘The globe of lifeblood trembled/Branching out into roots:/Fibrous, writhing upon the winds:/Fibres of blood, milk and tears’. This planetary body becomes the first female form, known as Enitharmon.

Plate 17 is subtitled ‘In the female death became new life’. The first woman is formed from the matter of Los’ pity, the new planetary body given human form. The verses on this plate are in the bottom half with stalks and vines rising to flower into the figures of Los and Enitharmon. There is a division between the coppery fire (a reflection, perhaps, of the copper plates in which the outlines of these images were etched) from which Enitharmon rises and the darkness in which Los curls in exhaustion and womb-like retreat. Los comforts Enitharmon, refusing to abandon her having brought her into existence. Blake describes how ‘Los saw the Female and pitied./He embraced her, she wept she refused/In perverse and cruel delight/She fled from his arms, yet he followd’. Further division ensues as they give birth to a child which will become Orc, the spirit of human energy, rebellion and revolution in Blake’s mythological scheme. The flames from which Enitharmon is retreating are from the forge of creation. They anticipate ‘the birth of the Human shadow’. It is not a joyful birth, however, as the downturned cast of her mouth and anguished eyes make plain.

Blake’s singular example of the unification of word, artisanal technique and visionary image was essentially inimitable, and his works were little understood or appreciated in his lifetime. His insistence on the validity of his own imaginative worlds in the face of indifference or derision made him a huge influence on ensuing Romantic artists, even if he was at odds with the Romantic temperament himself. His self-created mythology was an act of world-building which finds a place in the long and continuing tradition of the fantastic in the arts. It was out of kilter with the rationalist philosophy of the age, against which Blake’s work was partly a reaction. Perhaps it means more in the modern age, in which the idea of the fantastic is once more an accepted aspect of art and literature, and for which it offers a countervailing worldview to the all-pervasive culture of materialism.

Henry Fuseli - Titania and Bottom

Blake’s contemporary, friend and sometime collaborator Henry Fuseli made a far greater impact in his time, achieving considerable recognition and critical approval. He explored the creative possibilities of nightmares, mining deeply into his morbid imagination. Something of his self-image can be seen in his Self-Portrait As A Faun. Leering with a sensuous, full-lipped mouth, it is a self-conscious depiction of an inner self which revelled in its own licentiousness, uninhibited by any sense of conventional moral limitations. It’s an image, and implied philosophy, which anticipates the spirit of Surrealism. Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare, from 1781, has become a defining and much imitated image of the terrors of dark dreams, and the murky layers of the subconscious from which they emerge. The painting on display her, Titania and Bottom, depicts a scene from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was a favourite with the Romantics. The central figures, including Bottom with his transfigured donkey’s head, are surrounded by the deep darkness of the forest at night, from which a proliferating horde of grotesque creatures emerge. Fuseli lets his imagination fly in creating demonic transformations of the human form, hybrids spliced together in the laboratory of the mind. His night creatures are genuinely menacing, hoodlum homunculi with wicked grins, intent on malicious mayhem. One sullen old miniaturised fellow is kept on a leash, as if he is too frightful to be let loose even amongst this mob. Or perhaps he is an ageing changeling, grown wizened and stunted from his time in fairyland, and kept now as a grudgeful and spite-filled pet. Across the central hallway of the Tate, in the Art and the Sublime display (which has now ended, I belatedly note) which acts as an adjunct to this exhibition, can be found Fuseli’s Lady Macbeth Seizing the Daggers, from 1812. This shows the scene in which Macbeth emerges from the murder of King Duncan, and is met by Lady Macbeth. The blood on the daggers and on his clothes provides the only primary colour in the picture. Macbeth and his Lady are depicted as pallid ghosts, outlined in spectral white against the darkness, doomed forever to re-enact their bloody acts.

Richard Dadd - A Bacchanalian Scene

The opening of inner worlds has its inherent dangers. Journey too far and too thoroughly inward and pre-existent fractures can be widened, precipitating mental dissolution. Richard Dadd stands as an exemplar of such a fate, succumbing to a psychotic breakdown which resulted in the murder of his father and his spending the rest of his life in the asylum at Bedlam, and later Broadmoor. Angela Carter’s radio play Come Unto These Yellow Sands mixes a mock-critical assessment of his life and paintings with a biographical depiction of the way in which the worlds of the imagination can overwhelm the artist who leaves him or herself open to their influence. Dadd’s most famous picture, The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke, which he painted over many years in Bedlam (finally finishing it in 1864), is included here, alongside his Bacchanalian Scene from 1862. The latter is like a close-up of some of the spectators of the Fairy Feller’s incipient blow. Curving and spiralling twists of grass in the foreground give an idea of the miniaturised scale, a jungle in the greensward. The figures sipping from the bacchanalian cup and peering sideways out at us have strangely compressed features, with almond, slightly oriental eyes. Perhaps these reflected some of the people he had come across his travels in the Near and Middle East, during which he had begun to lose his mind. The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke is packed with similarly compressed figures, all gathered amongst the grasses, lichens and daisies. The more closely you look, the more creatures emerge, all either engaged in their own activities or watching to see the Fairy Feller wield his axe. In the upper left hand corner, a daddy long-legs blows a long, spindly trumpet, a fanfare for the blow which will split the carefully placed sweet chestnut in two. The compression of Dadd’s fairy creatures suggest a delicate airiness which feels the weight of gravity pressing heavily down upon them, as well as the pressure of the artist’s over-fertile imagination on his own head.

Dadd’s paintings tend to be very compact in size, whilst at the same time containing a wealth of painstaking detail. This is at the opposite end to the grand scale of the Romantic sublime, which revels in great and overwhelming scale, the subject matter sometimes extending to he size of the painting itself. This can be immediately seen as you enter the gallery in which the Art and the Sublime exhibition is hung, and your eye is immediately drawn to the huge canvases of James Wards’ Gordale Scar and John Martin’s apocalyptic paintings. These depictions of outer and inner worlds exist at opposite ends of the spectrum, but both contain immensities, stretching the limits of human perception by staring at the great and the small and seeking to break through to what lies beyond. Looking hard enough in both directions, outward and inward, it becomes evident that both are contained one within the other, as John Crowley suggests in his modern novel of fairy worlds intersecting with the real, Little Big; A self-reflecting recession of images caught between two mirrors.

Samuel Palmer - Evening

Another painter who tended to work on a very small scale was Samuel Palmer. He was greatly influenced by William Blake, whom he knew towards the end of his life. Palmer created a dream of an Arcadian Albion, a rural paradise which he drew from his imaginative recasting of the Darenth Valley around Shoreham, in Kent. This is an area I know well, having been frequently driven there as a child. It’s within easy reach of the South London suburbs, and like much of the ‘garden’ of Kent, is now enmeshed in a gridwork of busy transport links rushing towards the capital. Thankfully, a proposed motorway development which would have plunged through the heart of the valley was fought off, but the insect hum of traffic along its alternate ridgeway route is now a permanent background drone, along with the regular dervish whoosh of passing Eurostar trains. Palmer’s landscapes are often bathed in the glow of a burnished autumnal light, or illuminated by a full and round waxing moon. They are usually set during harvest time. Having said which, the painting displayed here, A Dream In the Apennines (1864), is on a relatively large scale, and is taken from his travels on the continent. It does have a similarly calm, bucolic air, however. Palmer didn’t seek the grandiose spectacle of the sublime when he went abroad. The figures here are perfectly at home in this landscape. Rome is a distant dream on the plain down below, a series of shadows beneath the pastel colours of the sunset sky. Grapes and goats replace wheat and sheep, but otherwise the atmosphere is much the same as it is in the Shoreham pictures. The mezzotint Evening, from 1834, is more typical, with its depiction of a shepherd dozing beside his obedient flock, recumbent beneath a sickle moon.

Palmer created a reverie of a golden age which never really existed outside of his imagination. A drowsy and dreamlike countryside expunged of poverty and starvation, mud and rain, and the back-breaking round of hard labour. His Shoreham was a pocket paradise, akin to what John Clute, in the Encylopedia of Fantasy, calls a polder. This is a word which derives from Dutch and indicates a low lying area of land reclaimed from surrounding water and maintained against further encroachment with ditches and dykes. Clute adopts it to describe those enchanted valleys or villages which are protected from the corrosive effects of the world which surrounds them. His definition, in terms of fantastic art and literature, describes ‘an active microcosm, armed against the potential wrongness of that which surrounds it, an anachronism consciously opposed to wrong time’. Samuel Palmer turned Shoreham into a polder of the mind, which he elucidated in his paintings, and into which he attempted to escape, a disappearing act which became increasingly difficult at the Victorian age built up a head of steam. The autumnal atmosphere and preference for late afternoon or sunset hues which colour his vision of an earthly paradise suggests that Palmer conceded his dream world was not eternal, and would soon pass.

I have drawn comparison elsewhere between Palmer’s paintings and the similarly contained and deliberately artificial stage-set world of the film A Company of Wolves, which was scripted by Angela Carter from her original recasting of the matter of fairy tales. Its forest setting is created from the imagination of an adolescent girl, and is another dreamworld which seems fragile and subject to disintegration upon waking. The film is an indication of how Palmer’s vision of an English paradise has proven intoxicating enough to endure, however. It proved to be a major influence on the Neo-romantics, the artists who emerged between the wars in the twentieth century, and revived the traditions of Romanticism in a new form. Their debt to Palmer is most explicitly acknowledged here in Graham Sutherland’s Cray Fields, which is a pastiche of the style of his engravings. The sun shines with a brilliant radiance through a copse of hop poles which stands on the edge of a wheat field, in which two men are working, bent under heavy loads. A star hangs above, visible even in daylight, keeping watch over this blessed landscape. Sutherland’s landscapes would become much more violent and less cultivated over time. He, like the other Neo-romantics, incorporated elements of modernism, recasting the Romantic vision in a twentieth century context. Figures were depicted in more geometrical forms, landscapes moved more towards a semi-abstraction, and the whole was subjected to Cubist fracture and the suggestive juxtaposition of unrelated objects favoured by the Surrealists.

Graham Sutherland - Entrance to a Lane

Sutherland’s Green Tree Form:Interior of Woods is a gnarled head of twisted protuberances, covered in lichenous green and set on a long grey tubular body. It could be a grotesque, barnacle encrusted creature of the deeps. His Entrance to a Lane is an abstracted landscape whose elements are jumbled up, and whose horizontal plane seems to be curling back up and over towards the viewer like a crashing wave. The grey of the road, with its white line, is like a tongue leading towards the maw of the thicketed wood. There seems to be a disembodied bicycle wheel beside the road, just in front of this portal, but of the cyclist, there is no sign. Welsh Landscape with Roads is a similarly unforgiving depiction of an elemental and indifferent nature, with a distended, blood-red sun hanging on the horizon like an unfriendly UFO. A figure is running down the mustard yellow road, arms thrown up in apparent fear. There are what seem to be the shapes of corn ricks, upon which the red sun casts its baleful light, in one circular field, although they could equally be the preparations for some ritual, the enactment of which the figure is attempting to flee. The ominous, ritualistic feel of the landscape is completed by the jagged sheep’s skull which lies in the bottom left corner. It looks like it could be a remnant of some far off Mesozoic age, whose atmosphere this land still exudes. The Black Landscape is again inspired by the Welsh landscape. A tarry and black mountain, redolent of the coal which lies beneath it, looms under a pink sky (lit by a pink moon?) In the foreground, fractured (possibly mined) gray fields of slate reflect the sky. A fistful of hardy plants are outlined on the horizon of the hill to the left. The mountain reaches a sharply clawed hand towards them. The whole landscape looks like a beast on the verge of rising with a devouring hunger.

Paul Nash - Pillar and Moon

Paul Nash (who I wrote about a while back) is represented by several paintings here. Totes Meer is one of his well-known pictures from the Second World War, and indicates his affinity with Surrealism. A dead sea of airplane wreckage sluggishly washes up on a sandy shore, piling up into a jagged tideline. It’s a bleak, wintry scene, lit by a cold moon. You can almost hear the grind and rasp of rusting metal, the harsh wartime replacement for the soothing rhythms of waves breaking and receding. The Flight of the Magnolia, from 1944, is another Surrealist work, in which the white petals of the blossom float hugely in the sky, the floral equivalent of one of Magritte’s apples or boulders. It harks back to Constable’s cloud studies or Turner’s hazy blurring of built-up horizon and sky. The flower merges with or emerges from the clouds, which themselves are scarcely distinguishable from the ocean waves. It seems almost to be crushing the distended, egg-like shape of the moon, which appears like a petal which has been torn off. The blossom also resembles the unfolding petals of a parachute. It is an emblem of life during wartime, a transient and fleeting thing which feels all the more precious as a result. The flower of the imagination is given free, if temporary, flight. Pillar and Moon is more typical of Nash’s evocation of the spirit of place of the English landscape, and of his imbuing of it with a deeply personal solar and lunar symbolism. Here, the stone globe atop the pillar is linked by the elevated runway of the treeline to the rocky sphere of the moon, a branch line to the heavens. The row of trees recedes in diminishing perspective before curving to the right, dividing sky from earth. The trees cast moonshadows which spread out to connect with the grey stone wall, the pillar itself standing like a geometrical treeshadow. There is a sense of yearning conveyed by the picture, a gulf which will never be bridged. The pillar becomes almost like one of Caspar David Friedrich’s figures, gazing out to sea. The pillar and trees also stand in for the megaliths of Avebury and the twin hills of the Wittenham Clumps which were the signature features of Nash’s most powerful landscape paintings, but which are absent from this exhibition.

John Piper - Seaton Delaval

John Piper’s Seaton Delaval, from 1941, is a picture of a ruined castle in Northumberland designed by John Vanbrugh in the 18th century. Piper was commissioned to draw numerous pieces of England’s architectural heritage during the war, to create a record in the event of their destruction. Seaton Delaval had already been destroyed by fire in 1822, and its state served as a premonition of the fate which might befall other grand country seats. The bland façade of the building looks like a theatrical flat propped up against a painted backdrop. It is boldly outlined, and smudged with the colours of firelit nightime. The pink, red and orange over the door look like they have been blended from carefully aimed theatrical spotlights. Perhaps they are cast by the flames of a November bonfire, or by the conflagration of a bombing raid. The idea of the Romantic ruin is now the prospect of the war damaged rubble after an air raid.

Keith Vaughan - Cain and Abel

Two other Neo-Romantic artists featured here focus on the human form rather than the landscape. Michael Ayrton tackles the Biblical subject of The Temptation of St Anthony, which had stirred the imaginations of Matthias Grunewald in the 16th century, and Max Ernst in the twentieth to lurid heights of delirious grotesquerie. Ayrton’s tableau is considerably more restrained, and a lot less explicit in its violence. St Anthony is still twisted in agonised contortions, but there is a sense that his pain is located more in his head than in any mortifications meted out on his flesh. His tormentors are more recognisably human than the sharp fanged and clawed devils who attack Grunewald and Ernst’s St Anthony. The man and woman who stand on either side of him are in starkly contrasting states of health, he bony and emaciated, she plumply voluptuous. A figure in the foreground, his cranium distended into a bulbous balloon, seems to have snatched the cruciform staff from the saint’s hands, and is kneeling in mock supplication. These are the demons of Anthony’s mind. Keith Vaughan’s Cain and Abel, from 1946, depicts the brothers as stark, granitic figures, like sculptural forms. Cain cradles Abel in his arms, the jawbone with which he has killed him still clutched in his right hand. It is an archetypally powerful image. They are isolated against a featureless volcanic landscape, which resembles the location used by Pasolini in the primal episodes featuring speechless cannibal bandits in Pigsty (Porcile). The beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey also comes to mind. Or they could be characters in a Samuel Beckett play, marooned in the externalised desert of their inner landscape. For a painting created just after the end of the war, it has an obvious resonance with the age.

A contemporary reflection on the legacy of Romanticism is found in a collection of modern photography gathered under the title British Landscape: Photography After the Picturesque. I have to say, in all honesty, that the purpose of these pictures completely passed me by, and I was in all likelihood suffering from gallery fatigue by this time anyway. Who know, to the receptive viewer they might prove revelatory. The exhibition as a whole brings together a disparate selection of the Tate’s collection, and makes it clear what a sustained influence the idea of Romanticism has had on the artistic imagination (and on the general notion of what an artist is). It’s an idea which has become so all-pervasive that it no longer really needs a label. Maybe Chatterton didn’t die in vain after all.