Charles BLACKMAN

Australian 1928–2018
worked in England 1961–66

Charles Blackman’s drawing and painting of 1952 and 1953 were discussed in the Melbourne press. People wrote letters to the editor, one of them claiming: ‘Blackman may have borrowed a young relative’s work—perhaps a bright third-grader—and submitted it as a hoax’.1 Not only did the artist take a professional interest in children as a source for his art, the poet Barbara Blackman, who married Charles in 1951, had studied child psychology.

Charles and Barbara Blackman lived in Melbourne for most of the year, with winters spent with Barbara’s friends and family in Brisbane. During the 1952 visit Blackman painted and drew Brisbane houses, calling them ‘the first personally articulate pictures’.2

By 1953 the dreaming, fearful and elusive schoolgirl was the motif in Blackman’s paintings. Private and government schools were clustered near the Blackmans’ studio and living quarters in Hawthorn, and Charles and Barbara were reading the Australian Symbolist poetry of John Shaw Neilson who wrote about schoolgirls. Blackman’s theme is often of psychological states; for instance, the roof of the houses, such as in Rooftop, 1953, has psychological associations with security, and houses are common in children’s drawings.

1 T. Shapcott, Focus on Charles Blackman, Brisbane, 1967, p. 22.

2 ibid., p. 16.

Jennifer Phipps

Lovers, 1960, was painted the year after the Antipodeans exhibition in Melbourne when Blackman won the 1960 Helena Rubinstein Travelling Scholarship. The Antipodeans, a group of seven Melbourne artists organised by Bernard Smith to exhibit in affirmation of an Australian style of figuration that was against pastiche, international abstraction, also marked the finish of such a grouping. Bryan Robertson, visiting Australia in 1960, liked his painting so much he included Blackman in the Recent Australian Painting exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, in 1961. Lovers, with emphasis on the dark silhouette of the woman, the partner melting into the background, his arm a negative space against the woman, the feather stars of flowers, was a subject given impetus not only by love between the artist and his wife, but by witnessing the infidelity of a woman who lived near his Melbourne studio in Collins Street. Between this drawing and this painting, Charles Blackman had painted his series on Alice in Wonderland, inspired by his wife’s increasing blindness and by his young family. Blackman and his family lived in London from 1961 to 1967.

Jennifer Phipps