Michelangelo, he is not

Quentin Blake's Parcel

5 April 2012

Should I, I wonder, be abashed never to have heard of Quentin Blake until the Dulwich Picture Gallery chose to give him an exhibition this winter?

Arthur Rackham, I know well, Heath Robinson too, and as both have on recent Christmases past been shown in detail there, I'd not have been surprised to find Edmund Dulac or the elegantly smutty Beardsley their successors, or even excursions into French and German illustrators of the children's book, but Quentin Blake ...? Who he? William Blake, perhaps ... now there's an illustrator of whose work I can never see enough, but Quentin? Who he, indeed?

I now know why I know nothing of him - we are much the same age and by the time he began illustrating children's books in the late Sixties they were of not the slightest interest to me.

There may, for all I know, be a thousand illustrators of whom I ought to know, for I gather from recent correspondence in The Independent that illustrators and those who teach the skills of illustration (of whom Quentin Blake is one) believe themselves to be on a par with Michelangelo and Rembrandt - but short of habitually prowling the kiddy-wink shelves of Hatchards or braving the local Waterstone's (and I have better things to do), nothing brings me into contact with children's books.

Now I think of it, once I'd outgrown the little books of Beatrix Potter with which I learned to read, I had no further taste for books addressed specifically to children, profoundly resented being given them and took, at a precocious age, to the trashy novels that my mother read - and no equivalent of Quentin Blake ever illustrated Warwick Deeping, Dornford Yates and Jeffrey Farnol.

Now, however, I am to understand that I am some sort of intellectual miscreant for not perceiving in the work of Quentin Blake a genius that "lies in his exquisite judgment of word/ image interplay and an approach to drawing that gives the reader/viewer room to overlay their [sic] own imagination on the characters".

I cannot see the point of illustration on which I am invited to " overlay" my own imaginings. I can see the point in illustrations of such quality as Rackham provided - illustrations so robustly his and yet stylistically of his time, imbued with the mysteries of symbolism.

Complete works of art in their own right, not wholly dependent on the narrative, they have the power to school a child's imagination, to form it, open doors for it and let the child move on. Nothing in Rackham is patronising or lamely literal; he made no concession to infancy or immaturity, but presented the child with the imaginings of an educated adult mind. Quentin Blake, however, makes concessions constantly.

His is the diddums approach, the make-it-easy giggling business of seeming to draw things as might a child - "Look, look," he says to children, "it's easy, you can do it too."

In this I discern the complacent vanity of a man who has not merely a ready way of drawing things, but conceives it to be the way of drawing them, the tricks and mannerisms of a man whose work is for the most part nothing but a formula on which he can rely, both to make things easy for himself and to guarantee the Pavlov's dog reaction of the child.

He draws the way he does because he does and it has become the expectation of his publishers and audience. He has not yet, as far as I am aware, illustrated the Bible, but if he does, then we must expect a second Bowdler.

In this Blake's Bible there will be only happy episodes in which almost everybody smiles and mild dismay, humorously put, will be the strongest contrary emotion - Cain will not kill Abel, Lot will not sexually conjugate with his two daughters, Samson will not play bondage games with Delilah, and David will not share an adolescent crush with Jonathan.

By and large, everyone, even the usually ranting and miserable St Paul (Disgusted of Tarsus), will have a jolly time and Christ's essential crucifixion will be reduced to a minuscule vignette on the horizon of an otherwise irrelevant drawing of storks resting on the roofs of Roman Jerusalem.

Ah, storks - I knew that birds would intrude into this article. Blake has, as they say, a thing about birds, the storkier and gawkier the better, but he demeans them. What to me is the daily pleasure of the crepuscular heron's visit to my pond is to him a caricatural joke, flapping gracelessly.

He denies the eagle's dignity and power. To him the tit is the tit of insult, the robin a wobin, the thrush a fwush. His gullible birds even abandon flight for the wayward pleasure of drifting lifts from helium balloons.

The tedious sameness of Blake's work numbs my response; it is too deliberately twee, too determinedly comical, the waggishness unwavering, the joviality contrived, the comedy calculated and the gentle (and genteel) jocosity tenacious.

This should have been a retrospective exhibition presenting Blake as an artist with beginnings, a maturity and a hint of things to come, but everything is much the same, suggesting that he sprang fully formed from the brow of some pantomime Athena.

Only in some broad brush drawings in green wash of women with birds, and reed pen studies of children with dogs, is there any suggestion that in Quentin Blake an accomplished draughtsman occasionally struggles to escape the trammels of selfconscious mannerism.

We must, nevertheless, be grateful to Quentin Blake that Dulwich offers even this unsatisfactory exhibition for a Christmas treat. Readers may recall that early in the autumn I wrote briefly of an exhibition scheduled there of drawings by old masters borrowed from the museum of Capodimonte in Naples.

Never was I more prescient when I wrote of my uneasy expectations of abysmal connoisseurship and absurdly ambitious attributions. The much-vaunted masterpieces did not come. No explanation has been vouchsafed but I'd bet my bottom dollar that the attributions and the quality proved to be so excruciatingly embarrassing that the drawings could be exhibited nowhere in this country without rendering the exhibiting institution liable to ridicule.

It was at this point that Quentin Blake blew in on a helium balloon, offered to rummage in his drawers, scrape his studio floor and provide something of an exhibition that might seem to be one of a series of which Rackham and Heath Robinson had been the worthy start.

It was a heroic gesture, over-generous in that it exposed him to hostile criticism from unsympathetic strangers, and it was mercenary madness on the part of the Dulwich Picture Gallery. I can imagine their combined response to this censure - "Shut your cakehole, Fishface!" from Blake, an insult used in one of his bolder illustrations, and a radish from the Gallery.

This last requires explanation: Blake's only other venture into the indecorous is his study of a man with a radish thrust up his fundament, the ancient Athenian punishment for adulterers, for which the Greeks apparently had a word as well as a sense of humour.

The English slang "ginger up" comes from the Arabian custom of thrusting ginger up the fundament of a man whose sexual stamina is on the wane to stimulate the prostate gland; I imagine that a radish must do much the same.

Next year's winter and Christmas exhibition at Dulwich is to be of Beatrix Potter; to this I look forward with rapturous delight.

Quentin Blake, Dulwich Picture Gallery, Gallery Road, SE21. Until 16 January. Tuesday-Friday 10am-5pm. Saturday, Sunday and Bank Holiday Monday 11am-5pm. Admission to exhibition and gallery £7. Under-18s, free.

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