CHARLES BLACKMAN Australian, B. 1928

A gift from the artist to Barbara Blackman in 1957;
until purchased by John Lavigne, Sydney, through Andrew Ivanyi Gallery, Melbourne, 1973;
until purchased by the present owner through Barry Stern Gallery, Sydney, in 1979
Private collection

Spring Exhibition 1978, Recent Acquisitions, Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, 25 September - 9 October 1978, cat. 44

Charles Blackman: Alice in Wonderland, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 11 August - 15 October 2006, cat. 44, illus.

Felicity St John Moore, Charles Blackman: Schoolgirls and Angels, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1993, p. 19

Geoffrey Smith and Felicity St John Moore, Charles Blackman: Alice in Wonderland, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2006, cat. 44, illus. p. 128; and pp. 18, 21, 27-8, 34-35, 126, 141

After a long career, Charles Blackman is ranked among Australia’s greatest modern artists. He was part of the now celebrated ‘Heide’ circle, coming to artistic maturity as one of the generation that included the slightly older Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, John Perceval, Joy Hester and the Boyd family. As early as 1952, Melbourne art critic Alan McCulloch wrote admiringly of his imaginative power and strong poetic bias. ¹  His extraordinarily beautiful Alice in Wonderland paintings of the later 1950s were recently exhibited at the National Gallery of Victoria, where the director, Gerard Vaughan, declared the series one of the most significant in twentieth-century Australian art.  Alice’s Journey is one of the two largest paintings in the series, together with Triptych Alice, now in the Art Gallery of Western Australia.

As Felicity St John Moore explains, Blackman had grown up in a household without books. The first time he heard Lewis Carroll’s tale of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was listening to a talking book for the blind with his wife Barbara. ‘Blackman was twenty-eight, a painter of adolescence and the feminine psyche. In love with symbolist literature, the poetic image, surrealism and Barbara, for Blackman the book was a doorway to his own myth. Listening to the story again and again, he was struck by the parallels with his own life – not just the feeling that anything could happen but that everything was happening at once!... Above all, Blackman was struck by the parallel between the fabulous Alice and the familiar Barbara, including her increasing sense of spatial disorientation to which they were both then adjusting’. ²

Barbara Blackman, pregnant with her first child, certainly identified with Alice’s journey, ‘moving enquiringly, questioningly, trustfully, bemusedly, changefully, into a new and strange world, trying with good sense and honesty to get her bearings in it, however often she changed body shape and whereabouts’. ³ Barbara’s own journey from innocence to womanhood, during the nine months or so in which Blackman worked so intensively on the Alice series, is paralleled in the imagery of surreal change and transformation.

Most of the paintings in the Alice series were completed in Melbourne, where Blackman had been spurred on by seeing for the first time Sidney Nolan’s iconic Ned Kelly series – equally personal and comparably literary – and by meeting John and Sunday Reed. By night he worked in an East Melbourne restaurant; by day he painted. Just as Nolan had identified in the mid 1940s with the fugitive bushranger, so the Blackmans identified their own somewhat topsy-turvy existence at the time with Alice. ‘The expressive figure of Alice, as Barbara, is ever present; so (usually) is the White Rabbit, as the artist, Charles, there by implication when not visible. So again the bouquet, a symbol of creation and carnality, the flowers in the centre of the table as though for a birthday….; the magic bottle, or bottle of change…; and of course the white tablecloth….’. ⁴

Alice’s Journey was painted not long after the birth of their baby and offers a mural-sized summation of Blackman’s Alice imagery. Auguste was born in April, the family moved to Brisbane and, with a studio under their house at Indooripilly larger than the converted coach house he had been using in Melbourne, Blackman was able to work on a more expansive scale. As Felicity Moore points out in her perceptive analysis of this painting, the events depicted in Alice’s Journey seem to be observed in retrospect, pictorially almost ‘as though from a panoramic mountain lookout’. On the left the blond-haired ’schoolgirl’ Alice falls through space, tumbling down the rabbit hole as the white rabbit looks dreamily on and a flask spills over the table’s edge. The bright red bird is Blackman’s alter ego, as in an early letter to Barbara - Love from your very own little Bird, Charles. ‘In the centre, Alice and her bouquet seem to be making their exit… Her thin arm links across the space to the metamorphic form of the departing White Rabbit, his masque head inverted, watchful eyes looking back… signifying the end of the journey’. ⁵ Meanwhile fragile flowers, a window, the half-hidden bottle – a magical transforming ‘drink me’ bottle? – and the lively gesture of a hand appearing from beyond the picture’s edge all offer promise for the future.

1. McCulloch, A., in Meanjin Papers, XI, 1952, p. 44.
2. In Charles Blackman: Alice in Wonderland, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2006, p. 10.
3. Quoted in Moore, F. St J., Charles Blackman: Schoolgirls and Angels, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1993, p. 4.
4. Moore, in Charles Blackman: Alice in Wonderland, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2006, p. 11.
5. Op. cit., p. 126.