CHARLES BLACKMAN

Private collection, Melbourne
Gould Galleries, Melbourne
Private collection, Sydney; purchased from the above
Savill Galleries, Melbourne
Private collection, Sydney; purchased from the above in 2004

Charles Blackman Paintings and Drawings, Peter Bray Gallery, Melbourne, 1953 cat. 10
Treasures Revealed: Modern Australian Art, Gould Galleries, 1 - 24 September 1995, cat. 32, illus. 
Australian Paintings, Savill Galleries, Summer 2004, Melbourne 26 February - 28 March 2004; Sydney 20 March - 3 April 2004, cat. 40

Good condition.
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Of the several series of paintings with which Charles Blackman has enriched Australian art, those of Schoolgirls are the earliest and remain among his most popular. Introduced in 1952, The Stairs is one of the first, being included in his solo exhibition held at the Peter Bray Gallery in Melbourne in 1953. The exhibition, which was something of a succèss de scandale, introduced him as an artist of great potential, readily acknowledged by art critic Alan McCulloch: 'this young artist has created a series of paintings which are at once exciting and extremely stimulating.'¹  It also introduced the viewing public to Blackman's ability to enter into the mind and mood of childhood, creating images both of the inner and outer person to a degree that has not been exceeded by any other artist in this country. The skilful use of a naïve style is but part of the answer, as is the predominance of the colour blue and its psychological associations. In The Stairs, the very awkwardness, for example, of the act of walking down steps and stairs becomes a metaphor of youth, ungainly, yet trying hard to be otherwise. This is pictorialised in the face and figure of the girl to the right, especially through the hunched shoulders. To the left the young head is, by contrast, more mature and purposeful, although the look is touched with an understandable questioning of what lies ahead. The three figures, divided as they are by bands of deep blue, can be read as representing stages of youthful progress - of coming, arrival, and going - and the states of emotion associated with each. The composition is tightly enclosed, with touches of visual rhetoric; yet there is promise and hope in the more sanguine passages.

Living in Melbourne in the early fifties, Blackman described how he and his wife Barbara 'were surrounded by thousands and thousands of schools and schoolgirls and school boys...  .'²  This combined with the lyric influence of Barbara's poem, Child Away, and of John Shaw Neilson's writing, the poem quoted in the exhibition's catalogue. 

'Fear it has faded in the night.
The bells all peal the hour of nine.
Schoolgirls hastening through the light
Touch the unknowable divine.' ³

They aroused within Blackman inner reflection, of ideas of frailty and isolation, which he translated through his gifts of creative imagination into images unforgettable  - and identifiable to all through our common experience of childhood.

1. McCulloch, Alan, 'Quantity - and Quality', The Herald, Melbourne, 12 May 1953, p. 10
2. Shapcott, Thomas, Focus on Charles Blackman, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1967, p. 16
3. Neilson, J. S., Schoolgirls Hastening.