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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  The Peter Elliott Collection
• Sale Date:
  30 Aug 2015 ~ 6pm - Part 1 (Lots 1 - 193)
  31 Aug 2015 ~ 11am - Part 2 (Lots 194 - 340)
  31 Aug 2015 ~ 2pm - Part 3 (Lots 341 - 511)
  01 Sep 2015 ~ 10.30am - Part 4 (Lots 512 - 754) and 2pm - Part 5 (Lots 755 - 1013)
• Lot #:
  3
• Lot Description:
  Charles Blackman
  (born 1928)
  Girl with Flowers 1952
  oil on paper on board
  96.5 x 72 cm
• Provenance:
  Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney
• Exhibited:
  Up Close and Personal: Works from the Collection of Dr Peter Elliott AM, S.H Ervin Gallery, Sydney, August-September 2011; Masterpieces from the Peter Elliott Collection - curated by Lou Klepac, Maitland Regional Art Gallery, 6 December 2013 - 7 February 2014, Orange Regional Art Gallery, 2 May - 15 June 2014
• References:
  Gavin Fry, The Peter Elliott Collection of Australian Art, The Beagle Press 2013, p. 98, cat. no. 84
• Notes:
  Charles Blackman was a key figure in the group of radical modern artists working in Melbourne during the 1940s and 50s. He and his contemporaries became friends with art patrons John and Sunday Reed, owners of Heide (now Heide Museum of Modern Art) and became known as the second generation of the 'Heide circle'. Like Sidney Nolan, Joy Hester, Albert Tucker, John Perceval and other artists of this group, Blackman was largely self-taught and the prodigious young artist soon developed a powerful and distinctive figurative style of painting. Blackman’s Girl with Flowers of 1952 is a rare and very early example of his distinctive painting style. The painting depicts a young girl holding a bunch of pink and white flowers. Her bodily outline is marked out by an over-painted area of blue tones that fills the entire background and relays visual attention onto the central figure. Unusually, the figure has been turned to its right as though distracted from adopting the more common full frontal position. Her facial features have been stripped of any details that might distract the viewer from her haunting expression. Blackman’s Girl with Flowers has a pictorial secret. There is a certain awkward nervousness about its young female figure – the turning of its Joy Hester-like overlarge head, the paleness of the skin, the hunched shoulders, the raising of its right shoulder, the furtive glance, the blurred area around the eye indicating movement, the pursed lips, the almost fleeing position of the semi-turned body. These pictorial details conveying a type of apprehensive tension are heightened when one realises that Blackman has depicted the figure’s eye as though it was facing frontally, yet it is shown turned to its right as though alerted to a potential threat. Considered in this way Blackman’s early painting Girl with Flowers pulses with a coiled caution. The secret of the painting’s power lies in its air of threatened innocence. Significantly, Blackman’s painting was created seven years before the controversial Antipodean exhibition in Melbourne in 1959, which first gave his work major public exposure. Blackman’s remarkable and rare Girl with Flowers of 1952 reveals the twenty-four year old artist at his emergent best, in the year of his first solo exhibition held in his Hawthorn studio.
• Estimate:
  A$30,000 - 40,000
• Realised Price:
  *****
  

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• Category:
  Art

This Sale has been held and this item is no longer available. Details are provided for information purposes only.