Charles Blackman (1928)

Aliases: Charles Raymond Blackman

Professions: Painter

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  CHARLES BLACKMAN AUSTRALIAN, B. 1928

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  c - CHARLES BLACKMAN , DREAM IN A CAT'S GARDEN

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  CHARLES BLACKMAN B. 1928 A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU

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  - CHARLES BLACKMAN , Australian B. 1928 TRIPTYCH Oil on canvas

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Charles Blackman Biography

(b Sydney, 12 Aug 1928). Australian painter. An itinerant, largely self-taught young artist in the late 1940s, he was inspired by the depth of feeling of Picasso’s pink and blue periods, and by the Melbourne painters of the Angry Penguins group, especially their efforts to see intuitively and compose freely, as children might be supposed to do. In a profoundly disturbing series of drawings and paintings produced during the early 1950s, Blackman elaborated the theme of innocence within danger as thoroughly as any of his key sources of inspiration—William Blake, Giorgio De Chirico, Sidney Nolan and Joy Hester, and the Australian poet Shaw Neilson. The urban settings of such works seem especially threatening: in still factoryscapes, vacant lots and suburban streets empty of all but screaming billboards, schoolgirls walk, run, lie prone, even float, as if lost in the open desert. Deceptively simple, such paintings as Prone Schoolgirl (c. 1953; Melbourne, Heide Park A.G.) were striking metaphors, not just of Australia’s cultural isolation from Europe and of the consequent invasion of American consumerism, but also of the psychological impact of Hiroshima and the Cold War. In the 1957 Alice in Wonderland series, all-seeing Alice, shocked by the adult monsterworld around her, but protected by the wisdom of common sense, became the artist’s signature-figure, paralleling Nolan’s use of Ned Kelly. Related paintings formed part of his contribution to the 1959 Manifesto exhibition of the ANTIPODEAN GROUP.

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