Wide appeal in an easily digestible form of modernism

Unlike Boyd, who painted portentous figures, Blackman’s range was more private and personal.

Charles Blackman was the last surviving member of the Antipodeans group, which was formed and held its single but celebrated exhibition in defence of figurative painting and against the ­encroaching hegemony of abstraction in 1959, accompanied by a manifesto drawn up by Bernard Smith.

Nothing could stop the ­momentum of the fashion for ­abstraction that dominated art in Australia for the next decade and more, and both the exhibition and its manifesto were considered ­reactionary at the time, although all of the individual members of the group went on to successful ­individual careers.

Unlike Arthur and David Boyd, who painted symbolically charged images of Aborigines and stockmen and judges and other portentous and sometimes pretentious figures, Blackman’s range was more private and personal, even whimsical. “A painter of women but not of flesh,” as Bernard Smith well observed in Australian Painting (1962).

Blackman’s pictures tend to evoke the sexually immature world of childhood, typically populated by schoolgirls with large eyes, little round hats or bunches of flowers. Probably his best-known ­series, painted in 1956, was devoted to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

These works, which were partly inspired by the failing eyesight of his then wife Barbara, have a certain coherence and focus that is not always apparent in other works by the artist. Altogether 46 pictures were painted in a single year, and most of these were reunited for an exhibition, 50 years later, at the National Gallery of Victoria.

Australian modernism is ­almost unique in being so strongly dominated by painters drawn to figuration, symbolism and quasi-mythological painting, including Sidney Nolan, Boyd and Albert Tucker.

Too often, however, these artists pursued an improvised and even eccentric symbolism without much concern for coherence — almost as though they felt that art could only be made by suspending critical judgment. The result was that all of them produced too much work of uneven quality, encouraged by a market more concerned with recognisable style than with aesthetic substance.

Blackman’s work is similarly variable in quality: generally decorative and sometimes poetic, it can also tend to be facile or even saccharine. But his paintings have always been popular with collectors, partly because his subject matter appeals to many people, partly because the style seems an easily digestible form of modernism, and partly because they ­always look unmistakably like Blackman.