Study for 'Mirmande (with surrounding hills)'

Dorrit Black first travelled to Mirmande in the south of France in 1928 when she enrolled with her artist companions Grace Crowley and Anne Dangar in the summer school of French artist Andre Lhote. It was here that Black first experimented with painting the landscape according to Lhote's compositional principles of cubist-inspired geometry, in which the fractured planes of cubist construction were ultimately integrated into a rhythmically driven whole.

Mirmande remained entrenched in Black's artistic imagination, and she returned in 1934 to once again sketch the pyramidal structure of the medieval hilltop village, later developing these works into paintings including Mirmande (and surrounding hills) (AGNSW collection) in which she explored ideas of drawing and painting the landscape with a ‘modern’ approach. This drawing and its related painting instil a sense of monumentality to the landscape while evoking the underlying, eternally vital forces of nature.