CHARLES BLACKMAN

Charles Blackman's schoolgirl series of paintings was his first major statement as an artist of individuality and enormous potential. Exhibited in his solo show at Melbourne's Peter Bray Gallery in 1953, they were described by leading art critic, Alan McCulloch as speaking with 'undeniable power and artistry'.¹ The reproduction of Blackman's drawing, The Swimmer, with McCulloch's review initiated public controversy and the exhibition, including the schoolgirl paintings, became a succès de scandale. Blackman moved to centre stage. Today, they are counted among his most popular works and are treasured in public and private collections alike. Their inspiration was the many Melbourne school boys and girls seen each day in his neighbourhood, and, a little later, the poetry of John Shaw Neilson. The subjects – children playing, girl on a bike, boy with a model airplane, walking home from school – are straightforward. Their singularity lies not in outward appearance but in the psychological states expressed through the images and their surroundings. As Thomas Shapcott wrote, these pictures 'still have a disturbing power to haunt and involve us in their emotionally vulnerable images of childhood as a grotesque and defenceless world' . ²

As in the related paintings, Children Playing and Swings – indeed in most of the schoolgirl series, the sense of isolation here is palpable, engendered as much by the colours as the forms.³ The pink flesh against the blue-greens bites the eye, and all is caught up in the agitated flicker of the blues. The faces in Children Playing and Swings are hidden; and in In the Playground they are shaded. The cyclone-wire fence expresses enclosure, prison-like. All is angular. The figures, particularly the girl on the swing, and the diagonal lines are used to create and reinforce the sense of threat through the visual rhetoric of repetition, echoed in the mosaics of the wire mesh. Although they are among others, each small person looks solitary and vulnerable. The mood is obsessive; and the swing is its metaphor.

1. McCulloch, A., 'Quantity - and Quality', The Herald, Melbourne, 12 May 1953, p. 10.
2. Shapcott, T., Focus on Charles Blackman, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1967, p. 18.
3. For Swings see Amadio, N., Charles Blackman: The Lost Domains, A. H. & A. W. Reed, Sydney, 1980, p. 17, fig. 1.9. For Children Playing, see Collectable + Exceptional: The Director's Choice 2007, Gould Galleries, Melbourne, 2007, cover illustration.