Ray Hughes Gallery

Private collection, Sydney

‘The Private Collection in Brisbane’, Brisbane City Hall, Art Gallery and Museum, June 1 – 30, 1990

The Estate of Edith Lawrence (Edith Lawrence was the life-partner of Claude Flight. Flight founded the Grosvenor School of Modern Art with Iain MacNab, Cyril Power and Sybil Andrews, and taught there from 1926-1930. The Grosvenor School artists include Cyril Power, Sybil Andrews, Eileen Mayo, Lill Tschudi, Ethel Spowers, Dorrit Black, and Eveline Symes)

Private collection, Sydney

Dorrit Black is known as a pioneer of Australian modernism. She is also known for her progressive artistic practice, which was well versed in modern and cubist movements that were taking place in London and Paris in the late 1920s. It was after her European travels to both cities between 1927 and 1929 that Black returned as an accomplished modernist linocut artist, exhibiting her first solo show of cubist-inspired works at Macquarie Galleries, Sydney in 1930.

Significant to note prior to the European turning point of her career were her works that reflected her inspiration of modernist and cubist artistic ideals at the time. Before going to study modernist prints with Claude Flight at Iain MacNab’s Grosvenor School of Modern Art, London in 1927; and then going to study cubism at Andre Lhote’s academy in Paris, Corner of the Garden was created. The linocut is a quintessential reflection of Black’s inspirations for modernist and cubist forms. Printing from five blocks Black was able to establish a multi-dimensional composition of a garden through the use of hard edge geometrical shapes speaking strongly to cubist constructs. The artwork marks a significant starting point of Black’s career in linocut printing. She produced linocuts from about 1927 to about 1951 but most intensively during the late 1920s and early 1930s.

In 1931 Dorrit Black established the Modern Art Centre Margaret Street, Sydney, a commercial art gallery, which she ran through to 1933. Black gave lessons in linocuts at the Modern Art Centre and assisted Claude Flight in the promotion of the artistic medium in England.

Australian Galleries, Melbourne (label attached verso);
Private collection, Sydney

Exhibited:
Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 23 October – 22 November 1995 (label attached verso);
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Margaret Olley Retrospective, 25 October 1996 – 5 January 1997, Sydney, Brisbane, Newcastle (label attached verso)

Private Collection, Auckland; International Art Centre, Auckland , Lot No. 1; Private Collection, Sydney

Creature was painted when Coburn was working on the major tapestry, Curtain of the Sun, which was commissioned in 1970 for the Sydney Opera House. Taking three years to weave while he was living in Aubusson, France this fine Coburn relates closely to the magnificent Opera House tapestry with its striking colours, form and pleasing composition. 

Painted at Oenpelli (Gunbalanya), Western Arnhem Land Church Missionary Society, Oenpelli (S142); The Giffen Collection, USA. The label verso reads: ‘Crocodile, by Ginilgini of Oenpelli’. Mossgreen, Australian & Oceanic Art, 22/7/14, Lot 317.

Private collection, Sydney