Charles Raymond Blackman

Charles Raymond Blackman was born on 12 August 1928 in Harbord, New South Wales, part of greater Sydney. He left school at age 13 and went to work as an illustrator and copyboy at The Sun newspaper in Sydney, teaching himself to draw during long hours in the paper's art department. He supplemented this self-directed training with night classes in drawing and design at East Sydney Technical College, now the National Art School, from 1943 to 1946.

He married in 1951 and moved from Sydney to Melbourne the following year. Recognition came quickly with the exhibition of his Schoolgirl paintings, first shown in 1953 in Melbourne, including a showing held in the living room of Mirka and Georges Mora. The 1954 painting Floating Schoolgirl, now in the National Gallery of Australia, later inspired Ursula Dubosarsky's novel The Golden Day. Blackman followed the Schoolgirl series with the Alice in Wonderland series, drawing on Lewis Carroll's text to explore themes of disorientation and vision; his second wife's failing eyesight is often cited by biographers as an influence on the work.

Blackman lived and exhibited in London for several years in the early 1960s, showing at the Whitechapel Gallery and the Tate Gallery in 1961 and 1962. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1977 for services to Australian art. The National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of New South Wales both mounted major retrospectives of his work in 1993, and the National Gallery of Victoria marked the 50th anniversary of the Alice in Wonderland series with a dedicated exhibition in 2006. He continued to paint and exhibit into his later years, and died in Sydney on 20 August 2018, at age 90.

Blackman is treated by Australian institutions as a defining figure of the country's mid-century modern painting, credited with fusing personal and literary narrative, drawn from childhood memory and from texts like Alice in Wonderland, into a distinct symbolic figuration. The National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of New South Wales each staged full retrospectives of his work in 1993, and the National Gallery of Australia's holdings, 19 paintings and 230 works on paper, reflect the depth of institutional interest in his archive. His cultural standing was underscored in 1966, when a portrait of Blackman by fellow artist Jon Molvig won the Archibald Prize, Australia's most prominent portraiture award. No verbatim critical assessment could be confirmed against a named critic and outlet in the available research, so none is quoted here.

Blackman's market trades almost entirely on Australian salerooms, and his works are recorded in Australian dollars far more often than in any other currency. His auction record is Mad Hatter's Tea Party (1956), which sold for AUD 1,891,000 at Sotheby's in Sydney in November 2017, according to the Australian Art Sales Digest. The Australian Art Sales Digest also records more than 9,000 Blackman lots offered at auction since 1969, with a sell-through rate of roughly two-thirds, indicating a market with substantial trading volume relative to many artists of his generation.

There is no single confirmed gallery or estate representative handling his work; instead, his paintings and prints circulate through multiple Australian secondary-market dealers and auction houses. No published catalogue raisonne has been identified for Blackman as of this writing.

Because no catalogue raisonne has been confirmed and no single gallery or estate representative could be verified as of this writing, collectors should treat provenance research and Australian auction-house documentation as the primary tools for authenticating individual works. Blackman's market is comparatively liquid by the standards of historical Australian painters, with a large number of auction appearances since 1969, but nearly all of that activity, including his auction record, is denominated in Australian dollars and transacted domestically, which is a material consideration for buyers thinking in other currencies.