Through Blackman’s looking glass

The Blue Alice has key links to the artist’s wife, Barbara.

Detail from Charles Blackman’s The Blue Alice 1956-57.

In 1956, when Charles Blackman heard for the first time the story of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, he was not a child but aged nearly 30.

His wife, Barbara, a poet who is vision-impaired, had borrowed the book from the Talking Book Library for the Blind. They listened to it together but, significantly, Blackman didn’t have access to the book’s famous illustrations to colour his imagination. However, he was so taken with the story that Alice in Wonderland became the basis of one of his most important series — 41 paintings completed between late 1956 to early 1957.

While Barbara instigated Blackman’s first encounter with the Alice story, she was also his muse because she is the model for Alice, with her long, flowing blonde hair. Blackman incorporated other personal references into the paintings — about his own life, his marriage and starting a family. There are also references to the restaurant where he worked, with its chairs, tables, teapots and crockery becoming key motifs.

Blackman, who died in August last year, aged 90, came to prominence in the 1950s as one of the group of artists, such as Sidney Nolan and Joy Hester, who were based at Heide, the house of John and Sunday Reed on the outskirts of Melbourne. Blackman was also a founding member, along with artists such as Arthur Boyd and John Brack, who signed the Antipodean manifesto that championed figuration. One of Blackman’s earliest paintings from his Alice series, The Blue Alice, is on display at Brisbane’s Queensland Art Gallery.

At the gallery, curator of Australian art Michael Hawker says the Alice series is definitely a breakthrough and put Blackman “on the map in Australia”.

“I think it is his greatest and best series,” he says.

Hawker explains that The Blue Alice is “very much tied up with Barbara”.

“When you think of Alice you think of this upside-down, topsy-turvy world, and in a way Barbara was going through that process when she was coping with her progressive blindness, so there was a similar experience.”

Hawker says what he loves about this work is that Blackman had never come across the story until he was an adult, but he manages to reinterpret it to create something completely new and vital.

“Blackman came from a very deprived background as a young man and as a child growing up in Sydney but, although he was uneducated, he was intelligent. So he looks at this story in a very adult, intelligent way and creates these fantastic images. It has that beautiful sense of the innocence of childhood, which is an aspect of his work that is engaging with the viewer. The Alice paintings are among the artist’s most-loved works.”

Charles Blackman, The Blue Alice (1956-57). Collection of the Queensland Art Gallery. Purchased 2000 with funds from the Queensland government’s special Centenary Fund. On display, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane.

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SALEROOM

For nearly 100 years the Joshua McClelland Print Room and the associated Rathdowne Galleries traded in Melbourne.

The business was so family-oriented that when Joshua McClelland died in 1956, his wife, Joan, continued to operate it in her own right until she died in 2017, aged 104.

The business has now closed, however, and an auction of stock, The Art of Constant Rearrangement, was held by Leski Auctions in Melbourne on May 5.

The clearance rate by lot was more than 90 per cent, and the average price realised was 54 per cent above the estimate. All prices include buyer’s premium.

One of the highlights was a colour linocut by Ethel Spowers, who helped bring modernism to Australia in the 1920s. The print, Collins Street, from 1926, sold for $10,755.

Other highlights included an oil painting by Eric Thake, Grass Flower, Moorabool, from 1974, for $15,535; an ink and watercolour by John Skinner Prout from 1855 for $956; and a Charles Blackman conte on paper of comedian Barry Humphries, c. 1963-64, for $6570. Bronwyn Watson