William Blake review – blazing heresies from the artist who blows Constable and Turner away

The poster for Tate Britain’s exhibition of William Blake uses the three Rs to sell this icon of the Napoleonic age to the turbulent Britons of 2019: “Rebel, Radical, Revolutionary.” It may seem an over-eager attempt to contemporise him – but Blake was all these and more. You could add pacifist (albeit a militant one who once got arrested after a heated debate with a soldier) and anti-racist, for as Blake’s devastating portrayal of a hanged slave in this show illustrates, he passionately protested against Africa’s subjugation.

And how about feminist? There is even a book of children’s stories that he illustrated for Mary Wollstonecraft, author of the 1792 manifesto A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. This hackish kids’ book wasn’t the finest hour for either, but it shows their connection through the radical publisher Joseph Johnson, while Blake’s great frontispiece to his own original work Visions of the Daughters of Albion, done in about 1795, shows what he learned from Wollstonecraft: a man and woman are chained back to back, the woman’s head lowered in despair. “Enslaved, the Daughters of Albion weep …”

This is not an exhibition of some old master honoured by kings and collected by aristocrats. It is a raw encounter with a heretical artisan who was ignored and despised in his lifetime and whose self-taught genius comes out of the popular culture of 18th-century London. In another of the book-illustration jobs he did to keep the tyger from the door, Blake depicts London on May Day. Milkmaids and street kids dance to celebrate the one day that belongs to the people. The entire show begins with Glad Day, a cosmic male nude stretching out his arms, in about 1795, to greet the light of a new age.

Yet this opening image leads in unexpected directions. It introduces Blake as an artist of the eye. You find yourself forgetting what Glad Day means and just enjoying the scintillating psychedelic colours and strong decisive lines. This is a kind of shock. Yes, this Londoner born in Soho in 1757 studied for a time at the Royal Academy (open to talented plebeians such as him and the Covent Garden barber’s son JMW Turner), was apprenticed to an engraver, and earned what little he ever did as a professional printmaker and artist.

But his greatness rests – doesn’t it? – on his command of the English language. The Tyger and Jerusalem, just to take his biggest hits, will always be read and sung. His self-published illuminated books used the “infernal” method he said he was taught by the ghost of his dead brother Robert, in which he removed everything except his raised words and pictures from a metal plate with acid. In these books, his art comes as a free gift with his verses – but is it great art in its own right? Critics conventionally say no. Blake is the contemporary of Constable and Turner but lacks their observational genius, they claim.

Tate Britain defies the snobs and sceptics by showing Blake as a straight artist, with only the barest nod to his writings. Blake fans, too, may be enraged at this disavowal of his poetic genius. But it’s worth the loss to get such a stupendous revelation that he is also a genius of art.

There’s not a dull moment in the razor-sharp artistic apocalypse unveiled here. The Great Red Dragon and the Beast from the Sea, lent by Washington DC’s National Gallery of Art – the work eaten by a serial killer in Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon – has to be one of the most compelling delineations of hellish monstrosity in world art. Multi-faced and muscular, the Red Dragon is charged in every sinew with evil – but it is one of us. It is near the Tate’s own The Good and Evil Angels, with its fire-baked flying golem whose dead empty eyes burn into your mind. Is it an image of the devil in all of us?

For we are none of us pure. In a depiction of Eve and the serpent, she takes a pear-shaped fruit straight from the serpent’s mouth. It’s clearly an image of cosmic fellatio. Blake is an artist of gothic sensuality. The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy depicts a fleshy raven-haired woman sitting among nightmare animals that could easily have been etched by his contemporary Goya. Behind her back, a naked man and woman embrace.

This is the art of revolution all right, but not according to anyone’s book but Blake’s own. The French Revolution and the European wars it precipitated dominated his most creative years. His images project the hopes and terrors of his age on a universal scale inspired by Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, which the impoverished Blake never saw. That majestic bigness is all in his mind. Entering the exhibition, you see small images lost in big rooms. All the gigantism of Blake’s vision is concentrated in these little printed and hand-coloured pages. Then as you look closer, something mysterious happens. It may be the weird corals under a turquoise sea where his Newton sits in terrible thought, or the pitiable drowning god Urizen, but you fall into Blake’s cosmos and see things his way. His tiny forms become colossal. His symbols blaze with truth.

Tyranny and slavery, freedom and fulfilment fight it out in his moral universe but what makes their battle enduring is the depth with which he distils our divided and contrary natures. I believe there really is a Red Dragon. It lives, like all Blake’s images, in the human heart. I must have caught Blake’s religion. It’s a heretic faith in humanity, a belief that everything is holy.

In this exhibition you will see images that look death and suffering in the eye and still believe in a redeemed humanity, a Glad Day. Blake expresses the worst and best of us. To see this show in all its variety and generosity and not love him, you would need a heart as wizened and shrunken as the tyrant Nebuchadnezzar who crawls below the ocean in one of his most coruscating images. He blows away Constable and Turner – and that’s with his writing hand tied behind his back.