Charles Blackman

(born 1928)

Siena Arcade, c.1962

Footnotes

PROVENANCE
The Collection of Barbara Blackman AO

In this dramatic painting Blackman recognizes the equation between early Italian art and his own experience of life. The pictorial means such as the compressed shape of the floating figure, the urgency of the paint and the sheer weight of black, are used to express feeling with maximum force. Feeling is also expressed directly through the projecting arm that springs from the receding arcades and the gentler chalky hand that appears from the umber ground below.

Hands are important in Blackman's art and they often float alone, as in The bouquet, 1956 in the Alice in Wonderland series; hands are dreamlike or gestural, and they are associated with blindness and the sense of touch. As Ray Matthew wrote in his monograph: "The hand she holds out, the touch she feels – love or affection, new life or death."

After nearly a year in London, he had recently returned from a trip to Italy where he went to look at the Italian primitives like Duccio, Cimabue and Giotto. This trip had been recommended by Sir Kenneth Clark who had invited the Blackmans to Saltwood Castle, Essex and told Charles that he was a painter for whom the Renaissance need not have happened. He regarded his painting as having a pre- Renaissance quality because it felt rather than described the shape of people.

Here, the geometry of the classical arcades and arches offers a timeless public space for the figure of a fallen street girl floating in the foreground. She links back to the larger backview schoolgirls paintings such as Girl with blue Bows, 1954 although deliberately denying their natural 'innocence'. More like a harlot perhaps, this older woman has fiery titian hair, a heavily daubed white neck and a garment of raw sienna yellow that has been crudely tooled and scraped with urgent painterly marks. Within this archaic landscape and in the company of a yellow amphora, she seems to hark back to biblical times and to Mary Magdalene, the 'sinner' cum redhead of whom there are there are several images in the Siena Cathedral/Duomo.

But the present painting also pays homage to de Chirico, the surrealist master of Italian arcades from whom Blackman had borrowed in his schoolgirls series, for instance the shadowy Burnley streets with their phallic water towers. In fact Siena Arcade comes close to being a subject painting, almost to imposing a Blackman theme over a de Chirico space/piazza. Blackman's preoccupation with the theme of blindness peaked in 1962, a time when his wife tended to think that blindness was like a punishment for a crime that she had not committed.

Here, the traces of a paradise garden below the ground have been buried beneath the earth colours of Siena. This rare example of his art has remained in the collection of Barbara Blackman.

Felicity St John Moore