The Wild Children of William Blake

John Yau (Author)

$15.00

Publisher: Autonomedia
Format: Book
Binding: pb
Pages: 264
Released: October 27, 2017
ISBN-13: 9781570273247

In the nearly fifty essays collected in The Wild Children of William Blake, John Yau explores the careers of a wide range of poets and artists who are, like the nineteenth century poet, dissenters from consensus—Wallace Berman, Alfred Starr Hamilton, Jay DeFeo, Hilma af Klint, Katherine Bradford, Barbara Takenaga, Forrest Bess, Emmet Gowin, Sophia Al-Maria, and Simon Gouverneur, to name but a few. Yau locates and defines a shared sensibility among his subjects whose work is often set at an oblique angle to the larger culture. He probes the reasons for this stance and its aesthetic consequences and, most provocatively, inspects the how and why behind the impulse to deflect their importance. For instance, he asserts that Jay DeFeo’s masterwork, The Rose, “calls many assumptions into question and challenges canonical thinking about what constitutes a major achievement in postwar art.”

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