Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1891 Adelaide, Australia

Died: 1951 Adelaide, Australia

Year of Migration to the UK: 1927

Other name/s: Dorothea Foster Black

Biography

Linocut artist Dorrit Black (nee Dorothea Foster Black) was born in Adelaide, South Australia in 1891. She studied at the South Australia School of Arts and Crafts under Harry Pelling (Pelham) Gill, c. 1909-11, then spent a year travelling with her parents, visiting England and continental Europe. She moved to Sydney in 1915 to study at Julian Ashton Sydney Art School and began exhibiting in 1916, returning to London in mid-1927 to spend three months at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art, founded in 1925 by the Scottish wood engraver Iain Macnab in his house at 33 Warwick Square in Pimlico. There, she trained in making linocuts under Claude Flight, who embraced this medium to celebrate the speed, movement and bustle of the modern world. This involved drawing the design on the surface of a linoleum sheet, then cutting out the parts which were to be printed in white, leaving the black lines in relief; the sheet was then inked and impressed onto paper or fabric. Black enjoyed the speed and vitality that this process offered her. One of her earliest coloured linocuts, Music, showed her adherence to Flight's principle that art should reflect the energy of the modern age: inspired by an evening at the Dominion Artists' Club in London, she depicted nude ochre-toned figures leaping across a vibrantly coloured abstract background. She combined rhythmic lines, blocks of colour and multiple perspectives to represent movement and the sound of jazz. Flight selected this linocut, together with others realised by his pupils, to be shown at the pioneering First Exhibition of Linocuts at the Redfern Galleries in June 1927. Considerable interest was aroused by this exhibition and, as Flight wrote in a letter to Black, who was by then in Paris, people were pouring in and liking it. Reviewers greeted the exhibition favourably and it was a commercial success with the sale of over 100 prints. In December of that year Black went to Paris to study at André Lhote's Academy and also continued her travels within continental Europe, also studying with the Cubist artist Albert Gleizes and meeting the inspirational art educator Franz Cizek in Vienna.

Towards the end of 1929, now a disciple of Cubism, she returned to Sydney. She kept in close contact with Flight for a decade after her return and together with other Australian pupils, including Ethel Spowers and Eveline Syme, was instrumental in bringing his innovative conception of the colour linocut to Australia and promoting it through exhibitions, mostly in Melbourne, during the late 1920s and early 1930s. In 1930 Black realised one of her most famous paintings, The Bridge, depicting the Sydney Harbour Bridge, a symbol of Australia becoming a modern nation, the revolutionary design of which resonated with the local avant-garde. In 1931 she became the first woman in Australia to run a gallery after opening the Modern Art Centre in Sydney. In many ways resembling the Grosvenor School of Modern Art, it was the country's first teaching and exhibiting space to promote modernism. In late 1933, she was called home to care for her ailing mother, but before returning to Adelaide she travelled to Britain, Europe and the United States. Among the prints that resulted from that trip is On the Rocks (1935), depicting a rocky ledge of a quarry at Winspit Cove in Dorset, characterised by simplified geometric shapes, bold colours and a strong rhythm, demonstrates her commitment to the modernist aesthetic. In 1935 she returned to Adelaide and worked mainly in watercolours until her studio-house in the suburbs of Magill was completed, when she reverted to oils; focusing on landscapes of the Adelaide hills and the south coast. In 1942 she became Vice-Chairwoman of the Contemporary Art Society. Despite actively exhibiting, she sold few works in her lifetime and never experienced great financial success or widespread recognition. She supplemented her small family income with part-time teaching at the South Australian School of Art. Periodically she also wrote letters to newspaper editors defending modern art or addressing political matters from a socialist perspective. Following a car accident, Black died in the Royal Adelaide Hospital, Australia on 12 September 1951. Art historical rediscovery of Black's work began in the mid-1970s and coincided with a major reassessment of women artists' contribution to Australian modernism. Her work is represented in Australian national collections and in the V&A in the UK.

Related books

Tracey Lock, 'Relaxing the Line: The Linocuts of the Australian Artists Dorrit Black, Eveline Syme and Ethel Spowers', in Samuel Gordon (ed.), Cutting Edge: Modernist British Printmaking (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2019), pp. 68-75
Tracey Lock, Dorrit Black: Unseen Forces (Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 2014)
Sarah Thomas, 'A Wider Vision: Dorrit Black's Modern Art Centre', Art and Australia, Vol. 44, No. 1, 2006, pp. 98-103
Stephen Coppel, Linocuts of the Machine Age: Claude Flight and the Grosvenor School (Brookfield: Scholar Press, 1995)
Stephen Coppel, 'Claude Flight and his Australian Pupils', Print Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 4, December 1985, pp. 263-283
Ian North, The Art of Dorrit Black (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1979)
Rachel Biven, Some Forgotten, Some Remembered: Women Artists of South Australia (Norwood, South Australia: Sydenham Gallery, 1976)

Public collections

Related organisations

Julian Ashton Sydney Art School (student)
Grosvenor School of Modern Art (student)

Selected exhibitions

Cutting Edge: Modernist British Printmaking, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, England (2019)
Dorrit Black: Unseen Forces, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia (2014)
Dorrit Black, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, Australia (1930)
Redfern Gallery, London, England (1929-1931)
Ward Gallery, London, England (1933-1937)
Colour Prints. Also Paintings by R.O. Dunlop, Basil Jonzen, Richard Eurich, Redfern Gallery (1934)

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Dorrit Black]