In this biography
Quick facts
- Born
- 1928
- Died
- 2018
- Birthplace
- Harbord, New South Wales
- Country
- Australia
- Nationality
- Not independently established
- Known for
- Schoolgirl paintings and Alice in Wonderland series
Why this life matters
His series show how everyday surroundings, literary encounters and personal relationships can feed an imagined world without producing a single literal explanation.
Timeline
Key moments
Marriage to Barbara
Their shared reading and life accompanied the developing work.
Schoolgirl motif
The figure recurred across paintings and drawings.
Alice series
A literary encounter prompted a distinct group of paintings.
NGV retrospective
Schoolgirls and Angels reconsidered the range of his career.
A career built through recurring figures
Charles Blackman was born in Harbord, New South Wales, in 1928. He emerged as a painter in post-war Melbourne, where his figures and imagined situations became part of a wider renewal of Australian figurative art. The schoolgirl was an especially important early motif. By 1953 it recurred across paintings and drawings, giving the artist a way to explore fear, dreaming and vulnerability through a recognisable but unsettled world. Schoolgirl with a Bicycle of 1953 and The Cigarette Shop of 1954 supply specific points within this development. A repeated motif could be carried into new situations without turning each picture into the same scene.
Barbara and the Melbourne setting
Blackman married the writer Barbara Patterson in 1951. Their shared life, reading and conversations helped shape the setting in which his art developed. Schools near their Hawthorn home and studio supplied an ordinary urban context; John Shaw Neilson’s poetry offered another point of encounter. Barbara’s experience of impaired sight also entered later accounts of the work. These associations overlap, but Blackman resisted making any one of them a complete explanation of every schoolgirl image.
A different series from a literary encounter
In 1956 Blackman encountered Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland through listening to the story. The resulting 1956–57 paintings developed a separate imaginative vocabulary of tables, figures and disrupted scale. Barbara’s presence remained important, while the paintings transformed literary material rather than functioning as straightforward illustrations of a complete text. The relation between a story heard aloud and an image built on a surface is one of the distinctive features of this phase.
Recognition and a sustained afterlife
A Helena Rubinstein scholarship in 1960 enabled a period in London. Blackman later received an OBE in 1977, and the NGV’s 1993 Schoolgirls and Angels retrospective reconsidered his wider production. He died in Sydney in 2018. His career is not adequately represented by a single schoolgirl or one Alice picture: recurring figures accumulated different situations and associations over time. Museum collections and the artist’s interview make it possible to study both those continuities and his own reluctance to reduce them to a neat biographical key.
Quick answers
Frequently asked questions about Charles Blackman
- Who was Barbara Blackman?
- She was a writer and Charles Blackman’s first wife, an important participant in the shared life surrounding his art.
- Are the schoolgirl pictures simply illustrations of poems?
- No. Literary reading was one association among several; the works also developed through local surroundings and Blackman’s own pictorial invention.
Keep exploring
Lives connected to this story
- Arthur Boyd
Compare distinct figurative practices within post-war Australian painting.
- John Brack
Compare how two Melbourne artists organise figures within everyday surroundings.
Sources and further reading
Explore the evidence
These references support the biography and offer further reading. Official records, first-person accounts and independent reporting provide different perspectives; image records document attribution and licensing.
- 1. National Gallery of AustraliaCharles Blackman obituary
- 2. National Gallery of AustraliaCharles Blackman interviewed by James Gleeson
Only the specifically supplied schoolgirl discussion in the 1979 interview was read; its full PDF could not be opened directly. No verse or interview dialogue is quoted.
- 3. National Gallery of VictoriaCharles Blackman: Joseph Brown Collection
- 4. National Gallery of VictoriaSchoolgirls and Angels
- 5. National Gallery of VictoriaCharles Blackman’s Feet Beneath the Table