Dorrit Black (1891-1951) Australian "Chapman's Pool ", 1935 Signed in pencil, inscribed and...

Dorrit Black (1891-1951) Australian
"Chapman's Pool", 1935
Signed in pencil, inscribed and numbered 1/50, linocut printed in colours, 23cm by 32cm

Dorothea Foster (Dorrit) Black was born in 1891 in Adelaide, Australia. In 1909 she went to the South Australian School of Arts and Crafts. Following this, in 1915, she attended Julian Ashton Sydney Art School.

From 1911-12 she visited Europe with her parents. A very modern woman, breaking out of Victorian traditions, she decided to travel to Europe again in 1927 for two years. She spent three months with Claude Flight and Edith Lawrence at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in London, where she was captivated by their use of colour and elevation of the linocut as an original art form.

She then studied at André Lhote's academy in Paris, and at his summer school, adopting the practices of Cubism. She returned to Sydney in 1929, and held the first of her six solo exhibitions with the Group of Seven Australian artists.

From 1931-33 she opened the Modern Art Centre in Sydney, becoming the first woman to run an art gallery in Australia. After travelling oversees from 1934-5, she settled in Adelaide, where she taught part time at the School of Arts and Crafts, continued to paint, and contributed heavily to the Australian art scene. In 1940 the National Gallery of South Australia bought one of her paintings. She continued to exhibit in both Sydney and Melbourne until her untimely death in a car crash in 1959.

Though an important member of the Australian modern art movement, Black's work was not greatly appreciated at the time and she received many scathing reviews from periodicals such as the Sydney Morning Herald. Many of her works remain in private collections, and as such few museums outside of Australia have been able to represent her as an artist.

Edith Lawrence had family connections in Dorset and she and Claude Flight took a number of summer schools in the area holding exhibitions at Worth Matravers village hall. (Edith later settled at Worth Matravers with her sister).

Chapman's Pool is a small cove to the west of Worth Matravers on the Isle of Purbeck. It is likely that the linocut depicting this location was created during one of Dorrit's visits to the summer school.