Charles Blackman

Charles Raymond Blackman was born on 12 August 1928 in Sydney, Australia (some sources give the suburb as Harbord, others as King's Cross). He left school at 13 and worked as an illustrator for the Sydney Sun newspaper, developing his draftsmanship on the job. From 1943 to 1946 he attended evening classes at East Sydney Technical College, now the National Art School, but was otherwise self-taught and did not complete a formal art qualification.

Blackman began exhibiting in Sydney in 1953 and became associated with the Antipodeans, a group of Melbourne-based painters that also included Arthur Boyd, David Boyd, John Brack, Robert Dickerson, John Perceval, and Clifton Pugh. His best-known body of work, the Schoolgirl series, developed alongside his Alice in Wonderland paintings through the 1950s; both series drew in part on his wife Barbara Blackman's progressive loss of sight, a fact that critics writing at the time noted directly in discussing the work's emotional charge. In 1960 he won the Helena Rubinstein Travelling Scholarship and moved to London, where he lived and exhibited for roughly six years, showing in the landmark 1961 survey Recent Australian Painting at the Whitechapel Gallery and in a solo exhibition at the Matthiesen Gallery the same year.

He returned to Australia and continued to paint prolifically. In 1977 he was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to the visual arts. A major touring retrospective, Charles Blackman: Schoolgirls and Angels, was organized by the National Gallery of Victoria in 1993 and traveled to Sydney, Brisbane, and Perth; the NGV mounted a further exhibition of his Alice in Wonderland paintings in 2006. Blackman died in Sydney on 20 August 2018, a week after his 90th birthday.

Blackman was recognized early as a distinctive voice within the Antipodean generation. His 1961 paintings of a blind girl, shown in the Whitechapel Gallery survey Recent Australian Painting, drew notice from British critics including John Douglas Pringle, writing in The Observer, and his solo exhibition that same year at London's Matthiesen Gallery, with a catalogue preface by then-Whitechapel director Bryan Robertson, was also well received. Later museum attention, including the National Gallery of Victoria's 1993 retrospective Schoolgirls and Angels and its 2006 Alice in Wonderland exhibition, confirmed his standing as one of the defining painters of postwar Australian figuration, with critics consistently returning to the emotional and psychological register of his schoolgirl and Alice imagery.

Blackman's market trades almost entirely through Australian auction houses and is anchored by his 1956 painting Mad Hatter's Tea Party, which sold for AUD 1,891,000 (about USD 1.43 million at the time) at Sotheby's Australia in Sydney on 21 November 2017, then and still his all-time auction high as recorded by the Australian Art Sales Digest. The next-highest recorded results are Alice on the Table, which sold for AUD 1,647,000 at Deutscher and Hackett, Sydney, on 10 April 2019, and Girl with Flowers, which sold for AUD 1,227,273 at Smith and Singer in November 2023. Since his death in 2018, his work has continued to be sold and exhibited through multiple Australian commercial galleries in collaboration with his family and estate, though no single gallery has been confirmed as the exclusive representative.

Blackman's market is deep within Australia but thin internationally, with almost all significant sales occurring at Australian auction houses rather than in London or New York. There is no catalogue raisonne, so provenance and verification through the artist's family and the galleries currently handling his estate carry extra weight. Because no single gallery has been publicly identified as the exclusive representative of the estate, collectors should expect to encounter his work across several Australian dealers, and should treat any single record price, including the 2017 Mad Hatter's Tea Party result, as a data point from a comparatively small and domestic sales pool rather than a broad market trend.