Charles Blackman

Matthiesen Gallery, London
Dame Miriam
Thence by family descent

Ray Mathew, Charles Blackman, Georgian House, Melbourne, 1965, p.16.

The board appears sound. There is a very slight area of rubbing to the extreme tip of the top right corner, only visible upon very close inspection. There are some tiny traces of light studio detritus and surface dirt, including some possible scattered traces of a light surface mould, visible upon extremely close inspection, but this excepting the work appears in excellent overall appearance. Ultraviolet light reveals a couple of tiny flecks of possible fluorescence in the bottom left corner, which may correspond to two tiny flecks of retouching. Housed in a thick painted wooden frame. Please contact the department on +44 (0) 207 294 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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The present work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the oil paintings of Charles Blackman by Geoffrey Smith being prepared by Sotheby’s Australia.

‘Blackman’s work speaks of the particular moment and of the particular truth of that moment … [His] paintings show their own synthesis, supercharged, between romantic vision and classical compression of form.’

(Bryan Robertson, intro., Paintings and Drawings, Charles Blackman, (exh. cat.), 1961, Matthiesen Gallery, London)

Born in 1908 in Ashton, Northamptonshire, the Hon. Dame Miriam’s life was profoundly influenced by the entomological and conservation work of her father, the Hon. Charles Rothschild, as well as by the zoological pursuits of her uncle Lionel Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild. Despite (compared to her peers), a relative lack of formal education, she was an intellectual gadfly and polymath, becoming a leading authority on parasitism and gaining several honorary doctorates and degrees from universities including both Cambridge and Oxford, where she was, during the 1960s, a member of the genetics school. Dr Rothschild was also interested in the links between art and science, promoting art’s therapeutic capacities for the treatment of mental illnesses. From 1983-1987 she placed The Adamson Collection of artworks by patients living with major mental health issues such as schizophrenia (another issue she had put her considerable energies towards from the 1960s) on public display at the family estate at Ashton.

Blackman's Two Friends is a significant painting from a key period of his life and work, the year of his first solo exhibition in London.

In 1961, the 32 year-old artist travelled to the United Kingdom with his family on a Helena Rubenstein Travelling Art Scholarship to participate in the legendary Recent Australian Painting show at the Whitechapel Gallery (along with with Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Albert Tucker, Brett Whiteley et al).  The curator of that exhibition, Bryan Robertson, considered Blackman was producing ‘some of the strongest, most forceful and urgent paintings by a young artist that I have seen in the past ten years’ (1) and arranged an exhibition for him at the Matthiesen Gallery in November.  Robertson himself wrote the catalogue introduction, in which he noted, inter alia, that ‘we are given a curious impression, very often, of a double image, positive and negative, as well as the space between people.’ (2)

Robertson had put his finger on a key feature and a recurrent motif in Blackman’s oeuvre.  Amongst his paintings we find works with numerous references to two figures – women, friends, lovers, schoolgirls and schoolboys.  Amongst the most affecting of all Blackman’s couple-works are the oblique narratives, what Franz Philipp called his ‘gentle dialogues between figures and shadows,’ (3) paintings such as the present example and Two Women (1962, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne).  In these works Blackman employs a bold chiaroscuro, often showing one figure (most often a woman or a girl) in bright light and full colour, while her companion is reduced to a dark, anonymous silhouette.  They are curiously ambiguous, these nuzzling, whispering couples.  Indeed, because of their patterned, cross-hatched backgrounds, it is sometimes difficult to discern where one form ends and the other begins.

In the present work the apparent psychodrama is one of sadness and sympathy.  Two figures – identically attired – are joined, their touching hands a gesture of their intimacy.  This underlying tenderness is contrasted with the expressive rawness of the paint, which at times has been scraped with the back of the brush.  The meaning of the painting and the import of the figures’ gestures remain elusive and tantalisingly unspecific.

Characteristically vague, Two Friends is nevertheless as moving as it is unanchored; Blackman at his thoughtful, dreamy, sensitive London best.

 

Geoffrey Smith, Chairman, Sotheby’s Australia

 (1) Bryan Robertson, ‘Preface’, Charles Blackman: Paintings and Drawings, The Matthiesen Gallery, London, 1961 (n.p.)

(2) ibid.

(3) Franz Philipp, ‘Antipodeans Aweigh’, The Nation, Sydney, 29 August, 1959, p.19