MINUTE PARTICULARS
Paolozzi’s Newton
The recent controversy over Paolozzi’s projected sculpture for the new British Library has highlighted the attitude, typical in its attempt to tame the revolutionary, of the British to William Blake; a classic example is the singing of Blake’s “Jerusalem” (in reality the conclusion of the Preface to Milton), as set to music by Sir Hubert Parry, at rallies of the Women’s Institute or the Conservative Party. The project is for a massive bronze sculpture, some 12 feet high and set on a podium similar in height, based on Blake’s color print Newton. After an alarm caused by the cancellation of government funding for this and other works of art commissioned by the Library, the casting of the final bronze is, at the time of writing, due to commence at any time.
The controversy began with two letters in The Times on 10 August 1992, from Richard Willmott of Brighton College and Brian Alderson. Astonished at “the cultural gaffe” that had led to the commission, Willmott pointed to Blake’s attack on Newton “for a mechanistic and materialistic view of the universe which gave no room to the imagination.” Alderson started by referring to the lack of original Blakes in the British Library (the illuminated books are staying in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum). He too suggested that the British Library had failed to understand the artist’s meaning. On 13

Strangely, Paolozzi had already used Blake’s image of Newton in another context, as one of a number of portraits of the eminent British architect Richard Rogers. This was in the context of an exhibition of Paolozzi Portraits held at the National Portrait Gallery, London, from May to August 1988. The exhibition was a culmination of several years of portraits by Paolozzi and included portrait busts of Richard Rogers, smiling and unsmiling, but the catalogue also illustrated two other projects based on the Blake print, one for a relief, the other for a three-dimensional sculpture. It was seeing this three-dimensional sculpture, or something like it, that led Colin St. John Wilson to commission the large version for the Library. Paolozzi’s own statement in the catalogue said nothing about his indebtedness to Blake but Robin Gibson, in his foreword, wrote of “Paolozzi’s preoccupation with Blake’s print of Newton, both for its formal and symbolic relevance” (7). Robin Spencer, in his essay on “Paolozzi as a Portrait Sculptor” compared Blake’s image to Rodin’s Thinker and suggested that Paolozzi had chosen the image more for “Blake’s belief in the primacy of Poetic Genius, and the ability of the senses. . . to see through and beyond materialism to an eternal truth . . .” and hence “as an allegory of the modern architect” (18-19). At the time Richard Rogers was Chairman of the Trustees of the Tate Gallery, where I then worked, and I mentioned to a friend of the sculptor how surprised I was at this identification of our chairman with Blake’s negative image of unenlightened reason. Eighteen months later, as his contribution to a series of “Picture Choices,” Paolozzi chose Blake’s Newton, accepting that “Ironically Newton concentrates on reducing the universe to mathematical dimensions” but going on to say that “While Blake may have been satirising Newton, I see in this work an exciting union of two British geniuses. Together they present to us nature and science, poetry, art, architecture—all welded, interconnected, interdependent. The link is the classically beautiful body of Newton crouched in a position which may bring to mind Rodin’s Thinker with all that implies . . .” This statement clearly defined and gave authority to the arguments of the friends and defenders of the sculptor. Given the multiplicity of scholarly interpretations of Blake’s works and the fact that we here have one artistic genius working on material created by another, perhaps we should not try to impose too strictly a Blakean interpretation on Paolozzi’s sculpture.