Untitled [Seated boy], 1954.

Pencil on paper, 238 x 203 mm (sheet), signed and dated in black felt-tip pen lower left: CB. 54; unmounted, in fine condition.

Charles Blackman (1928-2018) was born in Sydney, New South Wales, and was first employed as a copy boy with the Sun newspaper. He simultaneously attended night classes in drawing, design, graphics and lettering at East Sydney Technical College, and contributed cartoons for the Sun Junior children’s section. In 1948, he hitchhiked between Queensland and regional NSW before meeting Barbara Patterson in Brisbane the following year. They married in 1951 in Melbourne where they lived for the next decade. By this time, Blackman had also been introduced to John and Sunday Reed at Heide, and subsequently met a number of the artists in their circle, most notably Danila Vassilieff and Georges and Mirka Mora. Blackman gained acclaim for his early Schoolgirls paintings of 1953-54, based in part on the unsolved murder of one of his wife’s female university friends, before he attracted national attention with the Alice in Wonderland series of 1957.

The genesis of the present work is to be found in such powerful drawings by the artist as The swimmer, 1952 (Collection: National Gallery of Victoria) which attracted a pivotal, positive critique from newspaper art critic Alan McCulloch. It also echoes the intensity of Man at St Kilda, 1953 (Collection: Art Gallery of Western Australia) which fuses the figure of Blackman’s friend Barrett Reid with the fluted glass of a Walter Burley Griffen lamp. Untitled (seated boy) is executed in sure lines reflecting the artist’s long training in graphic design and cartooning. It is a direct and arresting image of a boy in a striped shirt holding his hands up in an expressive pose whilst seated on a small table. The drawing also features a perfectly observed glass of water containing a flower, the stem of which is optically fractured by the reflective qualities of the liquid.

Provenance:

The estate of the late Barbara Blackman

The library of the late Felicity St. John Moore (1933-2025), art historian, curator and authority on the celebrated Australian artist Charles Blackman (1928-2018)