Charles Blackman

Clune Galleries, Sydney
Private collection, Sydney; purchased from the above in 1965

W.D. and H.O. Wills Prize, David Jones Gallery, Sydney, 1964 (label on reverse)
Clune Galleries, Sydney 1964
Charles Blackman: schoolgirls and angels, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 18 May  - 22 August 1993, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 15 September - 14 November 1993, cat. 72 (label on reverse)

Felicity St John Moore, Charles Blackman: schoolgirls and angels,  Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, p. 88 (illus)

This work has the original stretcher, is not lined and is framed with a backing board. There is a faint scuff mark (centre left) across the chest of the gentleman and there is a similar scuff on his face. Otherwise the work is in good original condition.
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Writing to her mother from London in August 1962, Barbara Blackman mentioned in passing that Charles is painting 'relevantly to' Petticoat Lane Market,¹ and the present work may be the picture to which she was referring. However, it evidently proved something of a challenge for the artist to reconcile the two figures. There was probably too great a contrast between the dark, soft-edged brooding figure on the left, whose drawn-down hat and medals recall the ANZAC pictures of early 1960, and the open, graphic, sprightly rendering of the girl on the right. In fact, Blackman set the work aside for almost two years before finally solving his compositional problem with that favourite Blackmanian device of multiple stripes.

Cutting up old paintings into thin strips of canvas, he collaged them against the picture's blank ground, creating a flickering, kinetic effect appropriate to the description of a crowded city street. At the same time, the stripes also suggest a dense forest, or prison bars, and indeed Felicity Moore discerns a clear sense of threat implicit in the work: 'The juxtaposition of the figures – the darkly shadowed Jack the Ripper type on the left ... and the palely innocent virgin type on the right, harks back to the artist's early drawings of lurking men and schoolgirls.'²

1.  Cited in Felicity St John Moore, Charles Blackman: schoolgirls and angels, Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1993, p. 88
2.  ibid.