Across different continents and eras, three artists challenged their societies and through their work, searched for answers to questions such as, “what makes a person?” What did William Blake, Allen Ginsberg and Colin McCahon share and how did their vision drive their work?
This article describes how the three considered they were part of a larger tradition of visionary, prophetic artists inspired in some way by a power outside themselves. A companion article on Suite 101, The Artist as Critic of Society, looks at their role as social critics and how the three might have approached the question: how does the individual thrive in a culture or environment they may not find nurturing?
Guided by Angels
William Blake, 18th-century engraver and poet, survivor of the French, American and industrial revolutions, wrote in a letter to a patron: “I am under the direction of Messengers from Heaven, Daily and Nightly.” According to J. Bronowski in his book William Blake and the Age of Revolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), “we cannot understand the inner vision throughout Blake’s work unless we understand that from the outset it was Blake’s everyday vision.”
While legendary 20th-century American writer Allen Ginsberg, a Tibetan Buddhist, may not have understood spiritual direction in the same way, he did receive a mystical vision of none other than William Blake. In 1948, reading Blake in his Harlem apartment (possibly Blake’s poem Ah, sunflower, weary of time) Ginsberg heard the voice of the British poet, and saw the rooftops of New York illuminated, according to the website of the Allen Ginsberg Trust. Ginsberg took it as confirmation that he was born to the life of poet and seeker. (One of Ginsberg’s popular poems is the Sunflower Sutra, which may have been an influence on some of McCahon’s Muriwai paintings).
Blake, who wrote in the “bardic prophetic tradition” that inspired Ginsberg, remained a touchstone for the American poet during his whole life. In a tour with Bob Dylan , Ginsberg performed Blake’s poems accompanied by music he had written himself.
When McCahon was a child in New Zealand’s South Island Otago peninsula, he also experienced a vision, in his case a splendid, peaceful landscape, “something logical, orderly and beautiful belonging to the land and not yet to its people. Not yet understood or communicated, not yet really invented.” According to exhibition notes by Te Papa, New Zealand’s national museum, McCahon wrote that his work was to “invent a way to see” this vision and to communicate it.
Blake, an engraver when craftspeople and his craft in particular were being made obsolete by new industrial processes, and McCahon, who made a living working at Auckland City Art Gallery, were not famous and in fact received harsh criticism while they were alive. Ginsberg, who became a guru to some but was a symbol of decadence and evil to others, lived much of his life in a walk-up New York apartment. The Suite 101 article The Artist as Critic of Society looks at how the three men interacted with their cultural environments.
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