William Blake, The Ancient of Days, 1827. Courtesy The Whitworth Art Gallery

Exhibition Preview - Blake's Shadow at the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester, until April 20 2008.

William Blake is a unique figure in British visual culture, and his lasting artistic legacy, arguably more important than most, is perennially popular with academics and public alike, as well as a continual fascination for artists, filmmakers and musicians.

In the year following the bicentenary of Blake’s birth, Blake’s Shadow: William Blake and his Artistic Legacy is showing at The Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester and is the first exhibition devoted to Blake at the Whitworth Art Gallery since 1978.

Despite it being 180 years since his death, Blake still influences contemporary creativity and ideas. He is seen by many as one of the great synthesisers of cultural experience, attracting a myriad of followers with interests ranging from literature, painting, book design, politics, mysticism, philosophy, mythology through to music and film making.

Alongside his work, including prints, watercolours, engravings and book illustrations, the exhibition spans three centuries of creativity influenced by Blake. Work comes from the Whitworth’s own collections and loans from institutions across the UK including Tate, Manchester Art Gallery and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

Johann Heinrich Fuseli, Julia appearing to Pompey in a Dream, date unknown. Courtesy The Whitworth Art Gallery

Contemporaries from the late 18th and early 19th century include John Flaxman, J.H. Fuseli, Samuel Palmer and Thomas Stothard.

John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and G.F Watts are just some of the influenced Victorian artists represented.

British 20th and 21st century artists include Cecil Collins, Douglas Gordon, Anish Kapoor and Ceri Richards. This section of the exhibition features photographs and original works.

From the 1960s onward, writers, musicians and film makers like Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison of The Doors and John Lennon adopted Blake as a mystical seer and anti-establishment activitist.

More recently, as British musicians and activists like Billy Bragg and Julian Cope have grappled with notions of national identity, Blake has enjoyed something of a renaissance.

The exhibition also features a collaboration with Julian Cope in the form of an essay and an original composition. Julian Cope was a key songwriter in the post-punk music scene with his highly original group, The Teardrop Explodes. His 1992 album Jehovah Kill was a remarkable soundscape where the history of Britain was seen in Blakean-Pagan terms.

William Blake, The Descent of Typhon and the Gods into Hell, Milton's Hymn 'On the Morning of Christ's Nativity’, 1809. Courtesy The Whitworth Art Gallery

Blake’s Shadow examines this creative debt as evidenced in work by filmmakers Jim Jarmusch and Gus Van Sant, and various musicians, notably Jah Wobble, The Fugs, Nick Drake through to Fat Les and classical music from John Taverner, Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Britten, Parry and Palle Mikkelborg.

The exhibition will run concurrently with the Southbank Centre touring exhibition, Mind-Forg’d Manacles: Blake and Slavery, which finishes its national tour in Manchester. Blake was adamantly opposed to the slave trade and this exhibition explores both the horrors of slavery and mental enslavement, which Blake summed up by the phrase ‘mind forg’d manacles.’

Blake’s complex and dramatic plates from The First Book of Urizen will be included amongst his coloured relief etchings for The Little Black Boy and Songs of Innocence and Experience.

Blake has remained a charismatic force for artists, writers, musicians and filmmakers right to the present day. For many, Blake is the ultimate radical multi-media artist, associated with the avant-garde and alternative.

There are a number of events associated with Blake’s Shadow. Please contact the museum for more details.

This is an exhibition preview - if you have been to see the show, why not let us know what you think?