Dorrit Black
Dorrit Black belongs to a generation of Australian artists that includes fellow painters Margaret Preston, Grace Cossington-Smith and Grace Crowley, who travelled to Europe in the 1920s in pursuit of an international modernist education. Under the tutelage of French painter André Lhote, Black’s work began to reflect the Cubist principle of passage, a term that describes the flattening of pictorial space and the blending of objects into neighbouring forms.
By 1940 Black had returned to her home state of South Australia, living and working for the next decade at the foot of the Adelaide Hills. Black has described her landscape works of this period as a return to a kind of traditional realism, however, the geometric representation of forms and compressed spatial relationships continue to reflect her refined modern outlook.