AGNSW collection Dorrit Black The Chinese statuette 1929
https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/608.2014/
Cubism emerged largely from Picasso and Braque’s experimental collaborations in Paris between 1908 and 1914. In cubist paintings, figures and objects are broken down into overlapping planes, combining multiple viewpoints in a single image to emphasise the mobility and composite nature of vision. This new approach to painting was influential around the world, and for many, cubism became synonymous with modernism. By the late 1920s, the painter André Lhote claimed, ‘there are thousands of definitions of cubism, because there are a thousand painters practicing it’.
While the earliest phase of modern painting in Australia developed out of experiments with colour, by the late 1920s progressive Australian artists were redirecting their focus towards elements of cubist composition. Some artists travelled overseas to acquire, as Dorrit Black stated ‘a definite understanding of the aims and methods of the modern movement and in particular the cubists’.
Black and her Sydney colleagues Grace Crowley and Anne Dangar studied under Lhote and Albert Gleizes in France. Frank Hinder and Eric Wilson discovered cubism in America and Britain respectively. On their return to Sydney, these artists disseminated cubist ideas and methods, influencing both figurative painters and the emerging practitioners of abstraction.
