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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  The Australian Art Collection of Sandra Powell & Andrew King
• Sale Date:
  19 Mar 2014 ~ 6.30pm
• Lot #:
  24
• Lot Description:
  Charles Blackman
  (Born 1928)
  Housefront, 1954
  oil on paper on board
  89 x 120cm
  titled, signed and dated lower left
• Provenance:
  Mahoneys Galleries, Melbourne
• Exhibited:
  Contemporary Art Society Exhibition, 6-23 April 1954, cat. 16, 40gns.
• References:
  Arnold Shore, 'It's modern art: they mean it!' The Argus, Wednesday 7 April 1954, p. 9; Contemporary Art Society Exhibition Catalogue, Melbourne 1954, p. 3
• Notes:
  The inner suburban paintings of Charles Blackman from the 1950s were in a sense the 'street art' of their time. Inspiration was largely drawn from habitual early morning walks in Melbourne's laneways and empty streets. Richmond, Burnley, Fitzroy and Collingwood were among the suburbs most commonly frequented by Charles and his then wife and model, Barbara. Rather than painting en plein air, Blackman would return to his studio, where he would synthesise and reformulate these memories of alleys and dark corners. Although Melbourne streetscapes can be identified as direct referents, it is well known that literature was equally important as a source of inspiration, and this is nowhere more evident than in the Alice series of paintings. Fuelled by the critical and financial success of his first ever solo exhibition at the Peter Bray Gallery in the previous year, Blackman was working feverishly up to thirteen hours per day in his studio. When not at his easel he would read Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment aloud to the visually impaired Barbara1. In the opening chapter, the housebound protagonist, Raskolnikov, fears leaving his small apartment, as 'he had become so completely absorbed in himself, and isolated from his fellows, that he dreaded meeting, not only his landlady, but anyone at all'2. Further into the story, and speaking in first person, Raskolnikov recounts how, 'at night I had no light, I lay in the dark and wouldn't earn money for candles. I ought to have studied [but] I preferred lying still and thinking'3. Whether the figure in Housefront4 1954 is a reference to the young Russian student or a self portrait of Blackman reading the very novel, the literary connection is central to the narrative of the work. Painted in a key period of Charles Blackman's formative years, Housefront is a remarkable work, both in its simplicity and its sombre tone. Closely related in form and content to the schoolgirl, hoardings and terrace house paintings of the same era, the current work is also noteworthy for its formal qualities. Blackman is here at the tail end of his experiments with minimal 'hardish' edge abstraction. The flat squares and rectangles of blacks, grays, blues and pinks arranged in a semi-grid like format in Housefront 1954 are comparable to the work of Ben Nicholson5. In reviewing the Contemporary Art Society's 1954 exhibition in which the current work was included, The Argus art critic, Arnold Shore singled out Housefront 1954 from the 182 works exhibited and commended the painting for its 'effect of mystery and detachment'6. The single figure, set against a darkened interior, and as with many of Blackman's most charged paintings, powerfully conveys a deep sense of unresolved meditation, loneliness, tension and silence. 1 Felicity St John Moore, Charles Blackman: Schoolgirls and Angels, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1993, p.18 2 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, Cricket House Books, 2010, p. 3 3 Ibid., p. 280 4 Since the painting first came to the market in 2000 (see Australian Modern Masters and 19th & 20th Century Fine Australian and International Art, 3 May 2000, lot 91), the work has been erroneously titled Houseboat. With the support of the literature above the painting's correct title is here re-instated. 5 For example see Painting (1935, National Museums, Belfast) and Painted relief - plover's egg blue (1940, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh) 6 Arnold Shore, 'It's modern art: they mean it!' The Argus, Wednesday 7 April 1954, p. 9
• 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.