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(REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST) Oil on composition board Signed and dated '58 upper right; bears artist's name, alternate title and date 1958 on the reverse
Provenance Collection of Kym Bonython, Adelaide Private collection, Melbourne Purchased by the present owner from Mrs Violet Dulieu, South Yarra Gallery, Melbourne, c. 1978 Private collection, Melbourne Exhibited Charles Blackman, Johnstone Gallery, Brisbane, 17 November - 5 December 1958, cat. 25 Reference Langer, G., in Courier Mail, Brisbane, 18 November 1958 Mathew, R., Charles Blackman, Georgian House, Melbourne, 1965, p. 6, pl. 18 illus. Shapcott, T., Focus on Charles Blackman, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1967, p. 37 Moore, F. St J., Charles Blackman, Schoolgirls and Angels, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1993, p. 19 After a long and productive career, Charles Blackman is now ranked among the most important figures in modern Australian art. He came to artistic maturity as part of the generation that included the slightly older Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, John Perceval, Joy Hester and the Boyd family. He was part of the now celebrated 'Heide' circle, encouraged and supported by patrons John and Sunday Reed. He was one of the 'Antipodeans' who in 1959 launched their manifesto upholding figurative expressionism in avant-garde art. Yet his work speaks with a wholly individual voice. As early as 1952, Melbourne art critic Alan McCulloch wrote, 'His work has imaginative power and a strong poetic bias' (Meanjin Papers, XI, 1952, p. 44). The original title of the present work, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu comes from the title of the semi-autobiographical novel by the French writer Marcel Proust (1871-1922), usually translated as In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past. As Ray Mathew has observed, 'For most of us, the pity is that we do not recognise significance or uniqueness until the moment has passed, is lost. Blackman shows us the moment, the gesture, in all its never-to-be-repeated loveliness and sadness' (in Charles Blackman, Georgian House, Melbourne, 1965, p. 7). Here Blackman's montage of exquisite vignettes includes flowers, women's faces, children, birds and an angel; beach holidays; windows and doorways into dreams; and memories of youth and childhood. When the painting was first shown in 1958, reviewer Gertrude Langer wrote: 'His art stems from human realities. It speaks tenderly of suffering and joy, dreams and memories. His colours, brilliant as they are, are not employed for their own sake, but for their emotional import... A la Recherche du Temps Perdu [is] a mosaic of childhood memories held together by singing colours... In our technical age, when even art has a strangely inhuman character, a painter who speaks to the heart is to be treasured'. Some of the individual images refer to specific episodes and events. Near the centre, the round-headed baby is doubtless Auguste, the artist's first child, born in April 1957. Close by is the figure of Alice, whose adventures 'in wonderland' and 'through the looking glass' Blackman had already explored famously in his art: here grown too large to fit through the tiny door beside her. The sleeping blond-haired figure is probably also Alice; whilst the dreamy woman with eyes closed and her head in her hand may represent Blackman's wife Barbara. Blackman regularly read aloud to Barbara, who was almost blind, especially French literature which they both loved. Perhaps the bird in the upper left corner is intended as a symbolic self-portrait, for he had signed himself 'Your very own little Bird' in a letter to Barbara just a few years before (Moore, F. St J., Charles Blackman, Schoolgirls and Angels, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1994, p. 32). Flowers came to the fore in Blackman's art partly because of the flower farms around Tamborine, in Queensland, and the gardens and bouquets in Mrs Patterson's house where he was then living and working. The stooping farmer, and the hens, are reminiscences of his six months in 1955 at Avonsleigh, where Joy Hester and her husband Gray Smith were trying to make a living at poultry farming. The lovely figure of the little girl with her doll is closely comparable with images by Joy Hester herself from this same period. The charming picture-within-a-picture of a little girl in a 'schoolgirl' hat and red frock encountering a bull may well have been inspired by a similar composition by the Heidelberg School painter (and Blackman's namesake) Charles Conder titled That Fatal Colour, from 1888, then in a private collection. John and Sunday Reed had introduced the Heide circle to the early Australian impressionists, admiring their 'authentic' vision (see Clark, J. and Whitelaw, B., Golden Summers: Heidelberg and beyond, National Gallery of Victoria and ICCA, Sydney, 1985, pp. 102-3). The small horizontal landscape with a grazing cow may well be another reference to Heide and the Reeds' cows - Rainbow, Orchid and Orchid's calf named Summer by Sidney Nolan - who supplied fresh cream and butter for Sunday's afternoon tea-time rum babas and scones. Of course it was buttery madeleines, dipped in tea, that most famously led Proust on his sensory 'remembrance of things past'. This recently re-discovered painting, originally in the personal collection of doyen art dealer Kym Bonython, is one of Blackman's most important and intriguing early works. Its auto-biographical, episodic composition looks ahead to the artist's major multi-image 'Suite' series of the 1960s, which won him the prestigious Helena Rubinstein Travelling Scholarship and enabled him to launch his career in Europe. We are most grateful to Walter Granek for assistance in cataloguing this work.