CHARLES BLACKMAN Australian, B. 1928

Savill Galleries (label on the reverse)

Private collection, New Caledonia

Blackman’s ‘Suite’ paintings, small pictures combined into one to evoke a suite of memories and feelings, were among his most important and critically acclaimed works of the early 1960s. Indeed the concept, brought brilliantly to fruition in his Suites I to VI of 1959-60, secured him the Helena Rubinstein travelling scholarship to London.

As Thomas Shapcott recalled, the idea of the group of paintings, the set, the sequence, the suite of juxtaposed images, had been used by Blackman on a few other occasions prior that, but it was really from 1959/60 that he took it up seriously as a problem and a challenge. Shapcott noted that the totality in these multi-image paintings was greater than the sum of their parts. ‘It is like a rondo in music, each return of the central statement increases its stature’, he explained; and certain details have ‘an intensity of cumulative impact which might otherwise have been overlooked… In the suites, Blackman explored groups of people, the isolation between people and among people, the parallel images of withdrawal and outreaching’.¹ Blackman was fascinated by the imagery of women withdrawing into their own private world; the half-shadowed profile; the revealingly fragile nape of a young girl’s neck.

In the earliest of his composite pictures, Blackman divided the separate images with quite wide black lines – influenced, he believes, by the comic-strip layouts of his early newspaper work but also providing a dramatic ‘bridge’ between figuration and abstraction.² As the concept evolved, his component images came closer together, as here in Sixteen Images where the faces and hands and feet speak so eloquently of personal moments of solitude and introspection. In Sixteen Images Blackman evokes a depth and intensity of experience through repetition and conjunction.  He returned to multiple, composite viewpoints in works such as Bondi Suite and again, much later, for example, when he painted the Queensland rainforest in the 1980s in The Chess Garden.³

1. Focus on Charles Blackman, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1967, pp. 43-44.
2. See Moore, F. St J., Charles Blackman: Schoolgirls and Angels, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1993, p. 70.
3. See Amadio, N., Charles Blackman, the Lost Domains, A. H. & A. W. Reed, Sydney, 1980, p. 113 and Moore, op. cit., p. 127.

Please note this lot is subject to G.S.T.