William Blake’s Universe at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge was structured as a three-colored path through a blue-coded classical past, a fiery present, and a radiant-yellow future. The vision for the exhibition had been gestating for years as a way of rethinking Blake as a European artist by positioning him in dialogue with German art through a collaboration with the Hamburger Kunsthalle. This partnership revived an earlier collaboration with the Kunsthalle’s former director Werner Hofmann, curator of Kunst um 1800, a series of exhibitions including Blake (1975) and John Flaxman (1979), both curated by David Bindman. The 2024 exhibition stemmed, partly, from a reaction to the Brexit referendum in 2016, with Bindman joining forces with Esther Chadwick when she was working at the British Museum. Hamburg was the central point of reference not just because of this museum partnership and its curatorial tradition, but also because of the seminal role that the port city had as a nodal point for European Romanticism, and for the reception of Blake in Germany in particular.
