Study for House - Roofs & Flowers c1935 England
Oil on Canvas
32x27.5cm
Prov: Estate of the artist, Adelaide thence by descent Helen Finlayson (nee Black) Adelaide, 1951 (artists sister) Margaret Michelmore (nee Finlayson) Adelaide, a gift from the above. Estate of the above, Adelaide.
$10,000-15,000
Related works: House Roofs & Flowers 1935 England Oil on Canvas 50x38cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Gallery work illustrated page 85 Dorrit Black Unseen Forces.
Among the most important pioneers of modernism in Australian art, Dorrit Black played a significant role in introducing European Cubist principles to Australian painting during the early twentieth century. Her studies in Paris under André Lhote and Albert Gleizes, together with her travels throughout France and England, profoundly influenced her artistic development. Architecture and the built environment became recurring subjects in her work, providing opportunities to explore the relationship between geometric form, perspective and pictorial structure. Her paintings of European villages, houses and rooftops are now recognised as important examples of her distinctive approach to modernist composition.
During her return visit to Europe in 1934–35, Black produced a number of architectural subjects that demonstrated her continuing interest in the structural principles of Cubism. Among these is House-roofs and flowers, 1935, an important oil painting now held in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Painted in London, the composition brings together the angular geometry of neighbouring rooftops with the organic forms of flowers and foliage. Rather than relying upon conventional perspective, Black constructed a carefully balanced arrangement of intersecting planes and contrasting forms, demonstrating how familiar domestic subjects could be interpreted through the language of European modernism.
The present work, a smaller oil depicting the same subject, has remained within the family of the artist and bears a direct compositional relationship to the National Gallery painting. Its intimate scale suggests the possibility of a preliminary study or an alternative treatment of the composition, although its precise relationship to the larger painting remains to be established. Preserved through family descent, the work offers an intriguing insight into Black’s exploration of a subject associated with one of her recognised paintings of the mid-1930s, a period that marked an important stage in the development of her mature artistic practice.
