Hillside

Dorrit Black was a key figure in the development of modernist aesthetics in Australia during the interwar decades. Born in Adelaide, she studied in Sydney in 1915 under Julian Ashton and Elioth Gruner and during the 1920s increasingly focused on 'modernising' her practice. In 1927 she travelled to Europe in order to acquire (in her own words) "a definite understanding of the aims and methods of the modern movement and in particular - the cubists". She initially studied linocut printmaking with Claude Flight at the Grosvenor School in London, and then moved to Paris where she enrolled in the Academy of the Salon cubist André Lhote.

Hillside c.1933 expands on Black’s important print practice with a monochromatic work of a Sydney subject: it is thought it may depict a market garden near Central Station, Sydney. The artist cut another block of the same subject which was never printed; in this printed version the lines are simplified and the form rendered more geometric.