CHARLES BLACKMAN

South Yarra Gallery, Melbourne
Violet Dulieu
Corporate Collection, Sydney

Charles Blackman: new paintings, South Yarra Gallery, Melbourne, 29 March - 16 April 1966, cat. no. 15

Elwyn Lynn, 'Havens of domestic bliss', The Australian, 26 March 1966, p. 11
Alan McCulloch, 'Haunted images', The Herald, 23 March 1966, p. 29
Thomas Shapcott, Focus on Charles Blackman, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1967, p. 71

This work is not lined. There is a horizontal tear approximately 5cm in length and a vertical tear approximately 1.5cm long in the lower left hand quadrant, in the green area of the canvas. There is an 8cm vertical scuff mark at the lower right hand corner against the rebate and another 12cm and 5cm (intermittent) scuff on the middle canvas above the bowl. The work would benefit from a light clean and should be re-stretched.
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In 1964, after three years in London, and with his reputation well established in Britain, Charles Blackman moved with his family into 25 Hanover Gate Mansions, a large and 'elegantly dilapidated' first floor apartment in Marylebone. The artist set up his studio in the generous reception room overlooking Regent's Park, and in 'this larger scale geometry of urban family life ... this parameter of dignity, authority of space' he was able really to extend himself. As Barbara Blackman put it, simply: 'The bigger better house gave rise to bigger better paintings.'¹ 

The scale was appropriate to Blackman's rising status and ambition; during this period he was working towards a major retrospective exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery proposed for the following year. However, the Whitechapel exhibition failed to eventuate - the colonial expatriate was edged out by the new generation of British painters - and a rather more modest showing of the 'bigger better' pictures was held at the Zwemmer Gallery in September 1965. Critical response to the exhibition was nevertheless overwhelmingly positive: Blackman was interviewed by the poet Al Alvarez on BBC radio's prestigious 'Third Programme', and on 'The Critics' Bryan Robertson pronounced him 'easily one of the most important and original painters to have come out of Australia.' ² According to Ray Mathew, 'the show was stunning - I can think of no other word.' ³

The works from Blackman's final period in London are indeed amongst his finest. To begin with, they have all of the shadow-poetry with which he was always able to invest his figures of children, lovers and strangers. As with the best of his earlier work, they convey all the inarticulate or unspeakable yearnings and turnings-away that accompany our deepest feelings, the most delicate and desperate moments of being human. They relate almost-narratives that fall somewhere between the artist's beloved ghost stories and the absurdist dramas by Beckett and Pinter that he saw on the London stage in 1964, somewhere between the muffled presence of the unseen people in the flat next door or downstairs and the astringent, insistent reality of family life and love. As the critic Charles S. Spencer put it: 'The atmosphere of these paintings is tender and fragile, a quietness close to tears, a subtle, complex, dreamlike state, amorphous, inexplicable, but somehow to do with reality.' ⁴

Yet these new paintings are also a long way from naïve Antipodean imagism. What is particularly striking about many of the late London works is the way in which Blackman's familiar poetic-psychic-psychological tableaux are contained within furnished roomscapes of complex, elegant rectilinearity, 'a framework of a rigidity of colour and form that would do credit to de Stijl ... quite worthy of Mondrian.' ⁵ The nod to de Stijl is not unconscious; Blackman is a painter always alert to artistic precedent and alive to creative influence. The broad, blank, lambent slabs of walls and windows in the London interiors have something of the glowing rectangles of Mark Rothko, while in their populations of tables and chairs and in their teetering balance on the edge of non-objectivity, the room settings probably also owe a debt to William Scott. ⁶ Most apparent of all are responses to contemporary modes: stripey geometric abstraction - from Barnett Newman and his 'California hard-edge' inheritors - and the emerging fashions of Op and Pop. As Bernard Smith was to write in describing these works: 'wherever we look we can see Blackman making judicious use of avant-garde experiments.' ⁷

A few months after the Zwemmer exhibition the Blackmans returned to Australia, and paintings and drawings from the last few years were shown at the Skinner Galleries, Perth in February 1966, and at Violet Dulieu's South Yarra Gallery in March-April. The Melbourne exhibition in particular was a resounding critical success, and not simply from celebration of the prodigal's return. Bernard Smith wrote that it was 'nothing less than a personal triumph won at a critical stage of the artist's development; and must be numbered amongst the most original exhibitions I have had to review in these columns.' Elwyn Lynn described it as a 'quite magnificent show', and for Alan McCulloch it was 'a compelling exhibit ... like listening to Segovia playing the Spanish guitar.' ⁸ Brian Finemore selected Window Shadow for the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, where it quickly became (and has long remained) a popular favourite.

The most imposing picture on display was the present work, described as 'the biggest he has ever done' and one of the 'three very large and tour-de-force paintings [which] came out of the last year's work in London'⁹; the others were the squarer, four-panel painting The cul-de-sac, also known as The impasse (Art Galleries Schubert), and Patterns of an interior (formerly in the Mertz Collection).

Like Patterns of an interior, the basic arrangement of Triptych is two figures and two straight-backed chairs on either side of a table with a vase of flowers. But here the composition is more extended horizontally, is quieter, less busy. Instead of jazzy striations of primary colour, Blackman gives us subtle modulation and blue-green stillness. The painting has a strange submarine quality, a kind of dreamy floatiness. The flowers melt into a vague, ectoplasmic cloud. Everything seems suspended. The figures, evidently modelled on Blackman's two eldest children (eight-year-old Auguste and six-year-old Christabel) are poised, waiting or listening. Their faces are shadowed or turned away, perhaps through or against their mother's blindness. The girl stands on tiptoe, and the fall of her hair exposes the white nape of her neck. The boy perches politely on his chair, his little leg not reaching the ground. Both children exude an intense, poignant vulnerability.

The catalogue of the South Yarra Gallery exhibition contains an introduction by the satirist Barry Humphries, 'his comic mask slipping as he lays his little bouquet of gladioli at the feet of his friend.' ¹⁰ Humphries characterises Blackman's oeuvre and the essence of this work with great sensitivity:

'Blackman's pre-occupation with the psychic energy of dumb, necessary and ageless things: the chairs and windows, the table and the curtains which witness and re-inforce our moments of deepest solitude and reflection, is similar to the poetic jugglery of the poltergeist. Ghosts or shadows skip or linger in the shifting illusory rooms. The walls collapse like cards into a cage of light. Blackman ... is ... a great colourist who can create such sumptuous and prismatic canvases as these; building singing monuments to human awe - the hushed second, the catch in the breath, the pale sweet doubt, and that moment so transitory and crucial, one clock's tick before Love itself, when each human sense stretches taut like the bright wires of the spectrum before the snap and smudge over the gray, awakened sea.' ¹¹

At once delicate and powerful, intimate and majestic, Triptych is an ambitious and entirely successful statement by a major artist at the height of his powers, and undoubtedly one of the most important Australian paintings of the 1960s to come onto the market in recent years. 

1.  Barbara Blackman, Glass after glass: autobiographical reflections, Viking, Ringwood, 1997, pp. 236,237
2.  Quoted in Felicity St John Moore, Charles Blackman: schoolgirls and angels (exhibition catalogue), National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1993, p. 22
3.  Ray Mathew, 'London's Blackman', Art and Australia, vol. 3 no. 4, March 1966, p. 284
4.  Charles S. Spencer, 'First Commonwealth Arts Festival: Australian artists in London', Art and Australia, vol. 3 n0. 3, December 1965, pp. 215-216
5.  T. G. Rosenthal, 'Commonwealth Festival exhibitions', The Listener and BBC Television Review, vol. 74 no. 9, September 1965, p. XXX
6.  Rothko's first U.K. exhibition was held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in October 1961, and there was a commercial show at the Marlborough New London Gallery in February 1964; Scott was a substantial presence in group exhibitions around this time, and Alan Bowness's monograph on him was published in 1964.
7.  Bernard Smith, 'Show by Charles Blackman rich and varied', The Age, 23 March 1966, p.5
8.  ibid.; Elwyn Lynn, 'Havens of domestic bliss', The Australian, 26 March 1966, p. 11; Alan McCulloch, 'Haunted images', The Herald, 23 March 1966, p. 29
9.  Shapcott, op. cit., p. 71
10.  Smith, op. cit.
11.  Barry Humphries, (introduction), Charles Blackman: new paintings (exhibition catalogue), South Yarra Gallery, Melbourne, 1966