CHARLES BLACKMAN

The artist
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above in 1956/57
Fine Australian Art, Sothebys, 24 August 2004, lot 70
Private collection

Probably included in Survey III: Figurative Painting, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, January 1959

This work is not laid down.
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Charles Blackman's Avonsleigh paintings were made during the six months he and Barbara were living with Joy Hester and Gray Smith in the Dandenong Ranges.  With their rich variety of landscape and figure subjects, they represent a conscious move away from the artist's extended Schoolgirls series of 1952 - 54.  The domesticity of living in a small country cottage, the nearby flower farms, the impact of Hester's expressive watercolour faces and dolls, all contributed to a significant expansion of Blackman's vocabulary, a fact which was noted and applauded by the critic Alan McCulloch. 

When the Avonsleigh works were first exhibited the following year, McCulloch observed:

'The symbolic retrospective world of childhood - the theme most closely identified with Mr Blackman - has here entered an entirely new phase of its development.  It has become a more hopeful world: one in which the shadows have a certain radiance of moonlight, if not sunlight: a lyrical world in which fantasy triumphs over fear.'¹

The present work demonstrates the acuity of this assessment.  Girl at a table is not perhaps an entirely joyful work, but it is a long way from the threatening empty streets and shadow-obscured faces of the more disturbing of the Schoolgirl images.  The face of the girl is certainly abstracted, hieratic, like the 'Iberian' heads of Pablo Picasso, the pinched, graphic portraits of Ben Shahn, or even the melancholy masks of Blackman's contemporary Robert Dickerson.  It could perhaps be seen as envincing distraction, wariness, possibly even sulkiness.  And yet there is something powerfully affirmative and self-contained in this figure, something of the archetypal feminine: Schoolgirl and Barbara Blackman and Alice all in one.  There is quietude and poise in her attitude, and calm domesticity in the still life of teatime crockery and vase of flowers.

Moreover, there is a marked lyricism in the work's moonlight-submarine palette, in its blue-green darks and blank, negative-space lights.  This formula  - what the Argus critic described as 'a child and a few accessory objects ... portrayed with psychological depth, strong design and living intensity'² - would sustain the artist for some years to come. The figure with interior and still life would serve as an underlying structure both for the extravagant Alice in Wonderland paintings and for the more poetic seated girls and floral arrays of the London years. 

The present work has particular importance within the artist's oeuvre as a key transitional work, marking the appearance of an Alice figure avant la lettre, before the celebrated series of the following year.  Purchased by its first owners directly from the artist during a visit to Blackman's Chrystobel Crescent coach-house studio, it was evidently regarded by Blackman himself as a major work.  It was the painting he selected for exhibition in the National Gallery of Victoria's exhibition Survey III: Figurative Painting of January 1959. 

1. Alan McCulloch, 'Perpetual exhibitors', The Herald, 8 August 1956, p. 21
2. 'Individual touch in new show', The Argus, 7 August 1956, p. 11