Divided Painting c1962

CHARLES BLACKMAN (1928-2018)

Divided Painting c1962

oil and enamel on board
167.5 x 160.0 cm
signed upper left: BLACKMAN

Provenance:
Barbara Blackman, Canberra
Christie's, Melbourne, 1 May 2000, lot 179 (as Divided Faces)
Private collection, Melbourne
Deutscher~Menzies, Sydney, 6 December 2006, lot 32A (as Divided Faces)
The Gould Collection, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne

Exhibited:
Blackman: Paintings, Drawings, The Johnstone Gallery, Brisbane, 2-18 April 1963, cat.66
The Director's Choice 2012, Gould Galleries, Melbourne, 19 July - 31 August 2012, cat.8 (label attached verso, illus. exhibition catalogue)

Related Works:
Divided Painting 1963, archival pigment print, 98.0 x 92.0 cm

Divided Painting exemplifies the poetic phase that Charles Blackman’s oeuvre entered in the early 1960s.  Gone was his expressionistic storytelling of the 50s; those unrefined images made by a confident youngster delighting in creative play.  In comparison, the more serene visions of younger women grouped here are from the knowing hand of a mature and perceptive professional artist, intent on portraying human vulnerability.

Blackman’s friend, the poet Tom Shapcott, recalls that these emotionally mature paintings had evolved from a visit to Tamborine, near Brisbane.(1) Staying with relatives who lived there, the Blackmans had been captivated by the perfumed air carried from neighbouring flower farms; the painter’s blind wife, Barbara, was especially attuned to scent at certain times.  Several experimental paintings showing girls bearing flowers followed; then Blackman found in an illustrated book a striking pastel by the French Symbolist Odilon Redon (1840-1916), where a female head emerges from clustered blooms.

Blackman subsequently created a series of six considered paintings in early 1959. Carefully crafted in imported oils, all show a solitary woman with an abbreviated face holding a bouquet and lost in thought.  Blackman included them in a Melbourne group show he held with Arthur Boyd, John Perceval, Clifton Pugh, Robert Dickerson and John Brack, who told him the compositions were the best works he had painted.  Sure enough, his pictures drew glowing reviews (‘these gentle dialogues between form and ground are sensuous and subtle in texture, firm and light in mood’, the Observer’s Franz Philipp enthused),(2) and all six were swiftly purchased.

With money in his pocket, Blackman splashed out on materials and further developed this motif with six more paintings. Compositionally they were very different to what he had just exhibited, despite being consistent in style.  Blackman marked a sequence of subsidiary rectangular sections on each large masonite panel.  He painted more of his dreamy women’s heads in each section — sometimes also fragments of naked bodies — using colour, illumination and intense shadow to indicate mood and vulnerability.  Some women were blind, and shown with a shadow cast over their eyes; some were awkward or sickly girls glanced on city streets; many were just lonely and sad everyday people Blackman had observed and drawn.  With black surrounds separating each image, the finished paintings (which he called Suites) resembled several works combined.  Blackman likened them to grouped poems, or sequential variations on the theme of emotional vulnerability.

Blackman entered the Suites in a major art competition— the 1960 Helena Rubinstein Prize —and won this esteemed award. 1961 saw the artist and his family move to London, where Charles and Barbara quickly immersed themselves in the cultural scene.  The poet Al Alvarez (1929-2019) described their flat and studio as ‘the pungent, or punchy, centre for Australian exiles’, although they moved broadly, becoming close to the modernist poets Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), Ted Hughes (1930-1998) and Thom Gunn (1929-2004).(3) Divided Painting was produced during this special phase of the Blackmans’ lives, and sought to visualise emotional states being handled in the poetry of Plath and Hughes.

The artist created Divided Painting in much the same way as his moody Suites. As the title indicates, he used masking tape to divide a masonite panel into ten smaller sections, then painted abbreviated women’s heads within each rectangle. Blackman worked with a very limited palette of black, white and grey, in addition to one main primary colour.  He laid down a coat of enamel thinned with medium, then added a buttery layer of oil paint, gently manipulating it with a brush in some areas, and trowelling it with a palette knife in others.

Each of Divided Painting’s upper three sections shows two girls either holding back, or comforting each other, in moments of strong emotion. The other seven sections represent women confronting loneliness, grief, unrequited love, blindness, or the passage of time.  Some internalise their emotions: the magenta-toned woman in the centre looks at us with cobalt blue eyes that are reddened with worry; the grey girl beneath covers her face with a hand and weeps silent tears.

Still in London, Charles Blackman sent Divided Painting to Brisbane for his exhibition at the Johnstone Gallery in 1963.  The work was much admired.  In a later conversation with the poet Barrie Reid (1926-1995), Blackman summarised his intent with these grouped images of vulnerable women by citing a line from William Wordsworth (1770-1850): they are ‘the still sad music of humanity’.(4) Upon the Blackman family’s return to Australia in 1965, Barbara claimed Divided Painting for herself, and the work remained in her personal collection for much of her life.

Footnotes:

1. Shapcott, T., Charles Blackman, André Deutsch, London, 1989, p.29
2. Philipp, F., The Observer, London, 29 August 1959
3. Shapcott, T., op. cit., p.34
4. Barrie Reid, conversation with the author, c1990

Dr Christopher Heathcote
Dr Christopher Heathcote is an art historian, critic and curator based in Melbourne. He has authored several works on the history of Australian art, including Discovering Dobell (2011) and Drysdale: Defining the Modern Australian Landscape (2013).

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