CHARLES BLACKMAN

The Matthiesen Gallery, London
Private collection, Munich; purchased from the above

Charles Blackman: Paintings and Drawings, The Matthiesen Gallery, London, 3-25 November, 1961, no. 16, illus.

Ray Mathew, Charles Blackman, Georgian House, Melbourne, 1965, p. 16

Good condition. Surface dirt and several areas of bloom (mould?) in black of lower figure.
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Recently discovered in a European collection, the present work is a major painting from a key period of Charles Blackman's life and work. One of a sequence of four paintings which shared the title Double Image, it was included in the artist's first solo exhibition in London, and was one of only a handful of works to be reproduced in the catalogue. Blackman had travelled to the UK with his family on the Helena Rubenstein Travelling Art Scholarship, and had participated (with Nolan, Boyd, Tucker, Whiteley et al ) in the legendary Recent Australian Painting show at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1961. The curator of that exhibition, Bryan Robertson, considered Blackman was producing 'some of the strongest, most forceful and urgent paintings by a young artist that I have seen in the past ten years'¹  and arranged an exhibition for him at the Matthiesen Gallery in November. Robertson himself wrote the catalogue introduction, in which he noted that 'we are given a curious impression, very often, of a double image, positive and negative, as well as the space between people.'²

Robertson had put his finger on a key feature and a recurrent motif in Blackman's oeuvre.  Firstly, there are doubled heads, from the split-faced carnival mirror portrait of The Twins (1954) or the head-spinning Star gazer (1955) to the Through the looking glass and Janus-face Alice with teapot crown  (1956) of the Alice series, to deliberate pairs such as Two girls (1962, Sotheby's Melbourne in August 2007). Then there are works in which a whole figure is repeated. There is an almost heraldic or architectural symmetry in the blue-black busts of Spring Hill (1952, Sotheby's, August 2007), in the matching arm gestures of Waiting (1961) and Two schoolboys (1962) and in the hand-holding figures of The birthday (1952), The exchange (1953), The meeting (1961) and The cul de sac (1965).

In numerous twin-works from the late 1950s and early 1960s - Tryst I & II (1958, 1959), for example, or Dreaming in the street (1960), one figure (most often a woman or a girl) will be shown in bright light and full colour, while her companion is reduced to a dark, anonymous silhouette. They are curiously ambiguous, these nuzzling, whispering couples. Because of their flat, spaceless grounds, it is sometimes difficult to say whether such pictures represent two separate people or one and her shadow. Finally, there are paintings in which the duplication is of the figure and the space around it; Blackman's 'split-screen' Suites, for example. Here figures and gestures are repeated but are separated into window-voyeuristic boxes, and the shadow or reflection is not physical but psychological or emotional.

There is in fact something almost existentialist in these latter works, of which Double Image IV is exemplary. Blackman was reading Kierkegaard's Either/Or at this time, and the Danish philosopher's opposition of the hedonistic-aesthetic heart and the critical-ethical mind, and his struggle against the shadow of dread and despair, seem to be illustrated in many of these paintings. As Robertson put it, 'the paintings show their own synthesis, supercharged, between romantic vision and classical compression of form.'³  In the present work, the division of the canvas across the centre in the then-modish American style also divides the picture into registers of naturalism and abstraction. Above, the seductive, languorous, loose-haired, cock-hipped nymph reclining on the grass with her posy of red flowers seems to exemplify the attitude of Kierkegaard's 'A', the aesthete, while the meditative-contemplative figure below in its black leotard of shadow suspended in a pure, fiery void is the image of the ethical-reflective Judge Vilhelm.

At once sensuous and thoughtful, dreamy and rigorous, this work certainly merits Eric Newton's oft-quoted description of Blackman's art as 'big, tough and tender.'⁴

1.  Bryan Robertson. 'Preface', Charles Blackman: Paintings and Drawings, The Matthiesen Gallery, London, 1961
2.  ibid
3.  ibid.
4.  Eric Newton, Manchester Guardian, 6 November 1961