Charles Blackman: Alice in Wonderland

This book and exhibition celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the creation of one of the most important and beloved series in Australian art. pp. 142, b/w & colour plates. Clean, tight copy. #0717 Charles Blackman is renowned for his images that explore the duality of life: innocence and experience, fantasy and fact, dreams and nightmares, beauty and savagery. In 1956 Blackman heard for the first time Lewis Carroll’s extraordinary and bizarre tale of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – the story of a Victorian girl who falls down a rabbit-hole and encounters a perplexing array of characters and circumstances that force her to re-assess the world as she knows it. It was read by the BBC announcer Robin Holmes on a talking book that the artist’s wife, Barbara Blackman, listened to whilst suffering from progressive blindness. The story of Alice moving through a tableau of irrational situations, constantly frustrated by various events, paralleled Barbara’s own experiences, and Blackman painted the Alice pictures for Barbara and ‘to give sight to her poetry’.