DAVID BLACKBURN (BRITISH 1939-2016)
THAT WE SHOULD SEE THE BLOOD OF PETER FECHTER
pastel on paper
28 x 44.5cm; 11 x 17 1/2in
42 x 58cm; 16 1/2 x 22 3/4in (framed)

Executed in 1962. The eighteen year old Peter Fechter was shot dead at the Berlin Wall whilst trying to defect from East Germany to the Weston on 14th January 1962. His death caused uproar and was widely featured in the international press. Blackburn was moved to complete the present work in the immediate aftermath of the atrocity, which has since been comemorated in various media including film. After the reunification of Germany in 1990 a memorial was erected at the place where Fechter died.

Exhibited
London, Messum's, David Blackburn, 2016, no. 3 (illustrated in the catalogue)

David Blackburn (lots 132-139)

Palmer fused the fervent vision of Blake with the tradition of the landscape sketch. The result was the visionary landscape in which nature becomes an arena for the imagination… David Blackburn belongs to this tradition.
(Patrick McCaughey, Director of the National Gallery of Victoria and the Wadsworth Atheneum)

Introduction
At first glance Blackburn’s work appears abstract, but it is invariably firmly rooted in reality. Wide open landscapes and his sumptuous deployment of pastel have long been the starting points for his compositions. Blackburn’s was strongly influenced by the wild moorland that surrounded his hometown of Huddersfield, distinguished by its unforgiving tundra crisscrossed with black grit stone walls and vast skies. He remarked ‘I love the drizzle and mist of the North of England with its sense of decay.’ Later it would be the dry heat, bright light and vast terrain of Australia and the cityscapes of America, often observed from an aeroplane, which would inform the development of his aesthetic to make ‘a sort of visionary geometry,’ uniting the sublime with the ordinary.

Blackburn was awarded a scholarship to Huddersfield School of Art in 1955 where he explored a wide range of media, including textile design and print making. He subsequently studied at the Royal College of Art in Kensington (1959-62) where he was taught by Gerhart Frankl (1901-1965), an émigré in England during the War years, and a consummate pastelist. The tradition of working in pastels on the Continent was long established, and Blackburn’s post-RCA travels to museums and collections in France, Germany and Italy undoubtedly further informed his developing proficiency in the medium.

Blackburn first visited Australia in 1963 where he lived and worked in Melbourne, lecturing at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology for the following three years. It was the first of a succession of posts he held there, returning regularly to teach and to explore the country over the following two decades. In the late 1970s he also started visiting America, travelling widely throughout the country, and in 1981 was appointed Visiting Professor at Georgetown University, Washington DC. In America he was influenced by American urban architecture and artists’ interpretation of it, in particular the work of Richard Diebenkorn. Blackburn likewise explored the genre of the cityscape, developing the idea of the urban sublime in his work.

It was during the 1970s that his palette became increasingly colourful, and his pastels shifted dramatically from the dark forbidding series of his early endeavours (lots 132-134) to focus on the way light moves across landscapes creating areas of shadow. Or of bright sunlight passing through stained glass and creating colourful patterns on the floor (lots 135-139). When creating his pastels he began by blocking out the paper with rectangles of strong colour and then adding a grid in black over the top. He built up the picture surface in layers of colour and shade, sometimes adding collage. Incidental smudges to the pastel were incorporated into the pastel, to add texture and a sense of the transient.

Blackburn’s work has been shown widely in a range of solo exhibitions in both galleries and public institutions in the UK, Australia, the USA and on the Continent, including in the UK at Mappin and Webb Art Gallery, Sheffield (1970); Agnews (1970, 1972, 1974 & 1984); Huddersfield Art Gallery (1979); Royal Institute of British Architects (1985) and Dulwich Picture Gallery (1986), in the USA at the Vorpal Gallery, San Francisco & New York (1984 & 1985); the Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven (1989) and the Hart Gallery, Chicago (1994), in Australia at the Argus Gallery Melbourne (1965) and Watters Gallery, Sydney (1967 & 1968), and on Continental Europe at Kreis Unna, Westphalia (1994), amongst many others.