Dorrit Black

Australian-born Dorrit Black was a painter and printmaker who completed her formal studies at the Adelaide School of Arts and Crafts around 1914 before travelling to Europe so she could acquire, in her own words, an ‘understanding of the aims and methods of the modern movement'.

In Paris, studying with André Lhote and later with Albert Gleizes at Moly-Sabata, Sablons, south of Lyon, she was introduced to cubism, which revolutionised her approach to painting. Lhote encouraged his students to develop a cubist vision in their work. Students began with sketches of still life groupings or from life drawing classes of Parisian models. A morning studio session might have a nude female model as the subject, and in the afternoon perhaps two sailors would be drawn. After two weeks of sketching Lhote expected his students to ‘produce a composition from these drawings’.

For this stage Lhote had his students redraw their sketches into pencil compositions for later development into oil paintings. Their task was to modify previously-sketched images to fit an underlying grid which was drawn first. Following this grid, geometric curved lines were made, and objects were linked together by applying ‘passages’ of tonal colour between them, sometimes overlapping. Lhote’s purpose was to help students flatten their images of three-dimensional figures into more two-dimensional arrangements.

Black remains especially significant for bringing a form of cubism to Australia in late 1929. She is recognised as a passionate advocate for modern art and dedicated the rest of her life to teaching, promoting and practising modernism in Australia.

Soon after her return to Australia, Black established the Modern Art Centre (MAC) in Margaret Street, Sydney, which became a small, but potent, hub of modernism and where, through exhibitions and classes, she presented the most advanced ideas of modern art and became the first woman in Australia to run an art gallery. She later returned to live in Adelaide and in 1939 she designed and built her own home and studio in Magill. When Black moved back to Adelaide, she was active in the art scene as a teacher at the South Australian School of Art and in 1942 became vice-chairman of the newly established Contemporary Art Society. She exhibited regularly in London, Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney until her death in 1951.

Still life – interior brings further light to Black’s critically transformative period following her return to Sydney from Europe in late 1929 and before she settled permanently in Adelaide in 1933. It was a time of ferment and experimentation, culminating in the painting of her master landscape, The Bridge, 1930, which represents an out-of-doors companion piece to this inside subject, Still life – interior, c.1930. Each painting is equally composed within a complex geometric framework in which the dynamic visual play between curved and straight lines is explored.

Still life – interior retains the formulaic studio cubism of her French teacher, André Lhote, yet the areas of modulated tone foreshadow the powerful modelling of solid forms that would develop in Black’s later still lifes. The intimacy and informality of this painting is a confident advance on the staged group studio exercises undertaken at the Parisian Académie Lhote in 1928 and 1929 and records Black’s own private realm, most likely her flat at Rose Bay, Sydney. Although cosy, the space is smart: the patterned floor rug, tablecloth and the ceramics all point to the modern avant-garde. The two ceramic bowls on the table top are particularly notable and are plausibly early French examples created by her artist friend, the celebrated modernist potter, Anne Dangar, possibly for Studio Primavera, Paris. At the time, Dorrit Black was informally working as the Sydney agent for Dangar’s ceramics. Dangar was by then creating pottery at the artists’ colony at Moly-Sabata, led by the renowned French cubist, Albert Gleizes.

Throughout her career, Black refrained from depicting her
own image, but still life painting provided a realm in which she could fuse her own identity with the modern. In Still life – interior the hallmark, personalised decorative touches of the scarf and fresh flowers could be regarded as evocative manifestations of the artist herself.

Text by Tracey Lock, Curator of Australian Art at AGSA. This article first appeared in AGSA Magazine Issue 37.

Dorrit Black, Grace Crowley and Anne Dangar spent an extended period of study in the countryside summer school in the French village of Mirmande, near Montélimar in the Drôme. Each artist painted a trio of landscapes that marked their breakthrough from Post-Impressionism into modernism and their metamorphosis from inquisitive art students into professional modern artists.

The rural setting of the picturesque hilltop township provided the ideal conditions for their Paris-based Cubist teacher and theorist André Lhote to discuss with his students the long pictorial tradition of mountain village views. Lhote’s appreciation of European landscape traditions and his seemingly contrary look to the past reflected a renewal of classicism. Here the constructive geometries of Cézanne synthesised with the harmonies of Quattrocento art (15th century in Italy). Mirmande’s beautiful environment also fed into the idea that a regeneration of the machine- damaged soul was possible through immersion in nature.

Being in these aesthetic surrounds created a feeling of ease and informality, in contrast to the experience of city life at the Académie Lhote in Montparnasse. Lhote believed that the sensory experience of the rustic environment raised his students’ receptivity to creativity. His teaching involved opening up their sense perceptions and encouraging them to behold and create.

The students’ education would involve sensory immersion. As they walked along the labyrinthine roads in the township, they were surrounded by the geometry of the cubic buildings and curved walls they were painting. Even within the physical texture of the ancient stone walls and rocky paths of the village were embedded fossilised shells, which the women may have observed as natural evidence of the logarithmic spiral at the root of the classical proportions they were using to geometrically construct their paintings. This system of mathematical ordering allowed the students to gridlock subjects into place to create a sense of unity – it would transform their practice.

Text by Tracey Lock, Curator of Australian Art at AGSA. This text was first published in the Dangerously Modern Catalogue, published 2025.

The Bridge is regarded as Australia’s earliest cubist landscape painting. It depicts Sydney Harbour Bridge under construction. The view is taken from Sydney’s Balls Head reserve and captures a side elevation of the two incomplete curved arches of the bridge, the harbour waters in the centre and houses in the foreground.

Black has composed this composition so that our eye moves across the picture plane from early morning dawn on left, to evening on the right. In this way, observing and referencing the cyclical nature of time and modern progress. The span of time is further symbolised through the inclusion of a nineteenth century masted clipper anchored in the harbour and the modern electricity pole.

The artist’s depiction of the Bridge captures a spirit of excitement, and celebrates the dramatic engineering advancements being made during the Great Depression and giving the Sydney community hope for the future. The Bridge is a modern response to the changing Australian landscape.

Head study was created in 1933, once thought to be a self-portrait, this study has now been identified as that of a life model. Drawing from life was practised by Black throughout her career, whether in London, Paris, Sydney or Adelaide. Unusually, Black’s portraits are seldom identified, as she preferred to focus on capturing the form, colour and contours of her sitters’ faces. Although she produced a large number of impressive portraits, no known self-portraits have been identified.

Head study is dominated by Black’s strong angularity of form and composition. The sitter’s hairline and cut of hair, as well as her geometric clothing, add severity to the figure. Background shapes are simplified into geometric blocks of graduated colour. However Black’s tonal modelling softens the face, giving it a three-dimensional appearance in contrast to the flat planes surrounding it.

Intent on introducing Australia to modernism, Black started both an exhibition space and a school where she could teach art students the principles and ideas of the current modern European art movement. In March 1931 Black’s Modern Art Centre was opened at a site near Circular Quay in Sydney. The Modern Art Centre had a small room for exhibitions, and a studio that would allow twenty people to take part in the sketch club sessions held several times a week. The sketch club also provided Black with the opportunity of maintaining her studies of the human form. She produced a large number of pencil drawings and some quick sketches. Other works were finished drawings like Portrait. Sometimes Black would develop her life drawing studies into oil paintings.