Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
Lawyers are familiar with the phrase ‘the dead hand shall not rule’, which expresses the belief that testators should not be able to impose terms that control what will happen to their bequests long after their deaths. The phrase is frequently applied to a different sort of issue, the conditions on which a gift is accepted from its donor.
As bookends to Tate’s first major William Blake exhibition in nearly two decades, the curators, Martin Myrone and Amy Concannon, have chosen two single-sheet works, each small yet full of visual energy: Albion rose (cat. no.1; Fig.16) and ‘Europe’ plate I: frontispiece, ‘The Ancient of Days’ (in the Manchester impression, supposedly coloured by Blake in the final days of his
