Blake's art on the Web is focus of Sept. 24 lecture
The visionary Romantic poet and artist William Blake ( 1757?1827)would likely have loved the Internet, with its infinite capacities, options, and variations. Since 1996, much of Blake's work has been online and free at www.blakearchive.org, through the effort of Joseph Viscomi, the archive's editor and co-creator. Viscomi will talk about Blake's work in an age of technology when he delivers the21 st annual Fox-Adler Lecture at Skidmore College on Thursday, Sept. 24. Titled "Blake's Enlightened Graphics: Illuminated Books and New Technologies," the lecture will begin at 5:15 p.m. in Gannett Auditorium of Palamountain Hall on the Skidmore campus.
Conceived and designed in 1993-95, the Blake Archive containsapproximately 5,500 graphic images transferred to digital form, explains Viscomi,a professor of English Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Two-thirds of the images are drawn from illuminated books, and the remainder are Blake's paintings, drawings, and engravings. As an international public resource, the archive provides unified access to major works of visual and literary art that are, Viscomi explains, "highly disparate, widely dispersed, and often severely restricted as a result of their value, rarity, and extreme fragility."
The online archive allows a broad audience of scholars and students in classrooms and museums to "experience the wide range of William Blake's work, including multiple versions of his hand-colored prints," says Catherine Golden, the Skidmore English professor who each year organizes the Fox-Adler Lecture. An accompanying exhibition will be on view through Oct. 15 in the college's Scribner Library, co-curated by Golden and Wendy Anthony, the library's special-collections curator. The exhibition highlights Blake's work as illustrator and writer and includes works from Skidmore's Special Collections and from the private collections of Viscomi and the annual lecture's sponsor, Norman M. Fox.
The archive's structure and rationale grew out of Viscomi's earlier editing projects for the Blake Trust (volumes 3 and 5 of William Blake's Illuminated Books and Blake and the Idea of the Book, both published by Princeton University Press). Sponsored by the Library of Congress and supported by the Getty Grant Program and National Endowment for the Humanities, Sun Microsystems, the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (University of Virginia), and UNC at Chapel Hill, the archive received the 2003 Modern Language Association prize for a Distinguished Scholarly Edition?the first electronic edition to receive this award.
Viscomi, who earned his Ph.D. and M.A. degrees at Columbia University, has taughtat UNC Chapel Hill since 1984. His research examines Blake's techniques and the development of watercolor painting, print technology, and lyrical poetry in the Romantic period, focusing on works by major and minor figures such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Turner, Constable, Cozens, and Gilpin.
Skidmore's Fox-Adler Lecture Series is named in honor of Norman M. Fox and the late Hannah Moriarta Adler, connoisseurs and collectors of rare books. In 1967, Adler loaned her extensive collection of 19th-century books to Skidmore. After her death in 1989, Fox and his family took charge of her collection and initiated a yearly Adler Lecture, which has become an annual occasion to discuss the importance of literature and art in the nineteenth century. In 2001, the event was renamed the Fox-Adler lecture, and in 2005, the Fox family gave the collection to Scribner Library.