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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  Fine Australian & International Art
• Sale Date:
  29 Aug 2016 ~ 6.30pm - Part 1 (Lots 1 - 78)
  30 Aug 2016 ~ 2.30pm - Part 2 (Lots 79 - 328)
• Lot #:
  50
• Lot Description:
  Charles Blackman
  (born 1928)
  The Farewell 1968
  oil on paper on board
  150 x 131 cm
  signed lower left: CHARLES BLACKMAN; bears Gould Galleries label verso
• Provenance:
  Barbara Blackman
• Exhibited:
  New Paintings: Charles Blackman, Zwemmer Gallery, London, 14 September - 9 October 1966, uncatalogued; Charles Blackman: The Early years 1951-1974, Gould Modern, Sydney, 18 February - 28 March, 2004, cat.no.15
• References:
  A. Alvarez, Arts Review, 18 September 1966; W. Grant, Times, 27 September 1966; N. Gosling, Observer, 26 September 1966; Jewish Chronicle, 24 September 1966; F. Laws, Guardian 26 September 1966; F. Whitford, Commonwealth, London, September; T.G. Rosenthal, Listener, 30 September 1966. REFERENCE: Felicity St Moore, Schoolgirls and Angels: A retrospective exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by Charles Blackman, National Gallery of Victoria, 1993
• Notes:
  In 1960 Charles Blackman was awarded the Helena Rubinstein award that enabled him to travel with his family to London. His award winning painting was a haunting and poetic painting, Suite V (Collection: Art Gallery of New South Wales), in which multiple shadowy faces and figures encased in black frames were repeated across the composition, almost like a comic strip or a movie frame. The window as a framing device also became an important element in Blackman's work around 1965 when the present work was painted. At this time as in The Farewell, his isolated figures became more and more shadowy - like reflections or spectres passing through objects and belonging more to the world of the subconscious than the solid world of reality. As Charles S. Spencer aptly noted in the year they were painted, 'the atmosphere of these paintings is tender and fragile, a quietness close to tears, a subtle, complex, dreamlike state, amorphous, inexplicable, but somehow to do with reality'.1 It was a significant moment to be an Australian artist in London. In 1961 Bryan Robertson staged an important survey of contemporary Australian art at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, including works by Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, John Perceval and Charles Blackman. And when The Farewell was painted in 1965, Blackman was working towards an exhibition at the Zwemmer Gallery (Charles Blackman, New Paintings, 24 September - 9 October, 1965), that included this work along with others on the same theme, such as Window Shadow 1965 (Collection: National Gallery of Victoria). This group reveals Blackman responding to the ethos of contemporary art in the 1960s with its emphasis on reductiveness and geometric abstractionism; but empowered by his distinct and personal focus on poetic figuration and the vulnerability that he felt in his domestic environment with his wife Barbara, slowly losing her sight. This was encapsulated by the inclusion in the catalogue of a poem by E.E. Cummings (1894 - 1962), 'somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond', that alludes to 'eyes that are silenced' and hence had resonance with the inner grief that Blackman was experiencing.2 The poetic nature of these paintings also attracted the poet, writer and critic, Al Alvarez who wrote an article on Blackman's paintings for Studio International 3, and recalled later: "I... recognised in his paintings something I was after in poetry - an emotional starkness, images that worked on you with the immediacy of dreams. Blackman, at that time, was painting the same two female images over and over again - one was of a grieving woman, accusing and apparently sightless; the other was of a young girl, playing or lost or dancing or brooding over flowers.... The paintings were as loaded and obsessed as recurrent dreams. He seemed to be trying to create images for grief and guilt, for loss and persecution and tenderness in their most naked forms - soaked in feeling, dredged up alive and kicking from the unconscious." 4 The Farewell thus alludes to the feeling of loss; on a superficial level this could relate to the Blackman family departing London for Australia, but a deeper, more personal sentiment of love reverberates in this work with its tender, poetic expression. Frances Lindsay AM 1 Charles S.Spencer, 'First Commonwealth Arts Festival , Australian Artists in London', Art and Australia, Vol.3, December 1965 2 Edward, Estlin, Cummings,(1894-1962), American poet, painter, author 3 A.Alvarez, 'The paintings of Charles Blackman: The substance of dreams', Studio International, September 1965 4 A.Alvarez, Where did it all go right?, Bloomsbury, London, 1999, pp.289-90
• Estimate:
  A$50,000 - 70,000
• 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.