CHARLES BLACKMAN Australian, B. 1928

Purchased by the present owner from Lauraine Diggins Fine Art

Private collection, United Kingdom

After a long career, Charles Blackman is ranked among Australia's leading modern artists. He was part of the now celebrated ‘Heide’ circle, coming to artistic maturity in 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 Blackman’s early 'Schoolgirl' paintings, exhibited from 1953, are now considered among his most important and beautiful works.

The Schoolgirl series was inspired partly by Blackman’s daily life at the time. Living in an old coach house in Hawthorn, and travelling to and from Toorak for casual gardening jobs, uniformed schoolchildren were a daily sight. He loved the mysterious light of early evening, that hour between the busy-ness of daytime and the mystery of the night. Here two young girls, in their uniform of pleated skirts and wide-brimmed hats, are lit by the last rays of the sun. A terrace of windowless cottages forms a slightly foreboding backdrop, enclosing and yet punctuated by blank, dark doorways. The colour scheme, with its twilight blue and warm pink tones, is seen in a number of the paintings included in the artist’s first one-person exhibition in 1953. The rosy pinks suggests femininity and innocence, themes that resonate in Blackman’s art and derive largely from childhood memories of his mother and three sisters.

The ambiguous conjunction of carefree girls with an atmosphere of slight unease in Schoolgirl owes something to Blackman’s memory of the unsolved murder of one of his wife Barbara’s university friends. In his imagination, this episode and his own experiences were linked with lines by the partly-blind poet John Shaw Neilson, which he remembers Sunday Reed showing him when he was working on his first schoolgirl images. Indeed he quoted a stanza from one of Neilson’s poems in his own 1953 exhibition catalogue, evoking 'schoolgirls hastening through the light', who ‘touch the unknowable divine’. Nevertheless Schoolgirl is one of the most animated and engaging paintings in the group. These children 'hastening down the way' are cheerful companions, accomplices together in the world of dreams and emotion that Blackman so poignantly evokes. 

1. McCulloch, A., in Meanjin Papers, XI, 1952, p. 44.