Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Commissioned by Cynthia Allen, Adelaide
A gift to Mrs M.J. Carter
thence by descent
Mrs Elizabeth Stokes (née Parker)
Private collection, Brisbane

'It is the artist's business to reveal to mankind a new outlook on life and the world.' Dorrit Black, 1946

As a Committee member of the Royal South Australian Art Society, Dorrit Black was particularly involved in the running of its sketch club. Her involvement in the club 'provided opportunities to explore portraiture' producing 'an impressive group of portraits of willing subjects throughout her career'.1 Black challenged herself to explore the human body in a variety of poses, often painting the members of the sketch club themselves, hard at work and demonstrated a 'beautifully controlled feeling for line, proportion and weight distribution'2. Black's ability in capturing the sitter's innermost thoughts is evident in this portrait, thought to be of Kym Bonython, capturing a contemplative figure in a private moment of reflection.

Both Bonython and Black shared a love of art and music and it is possible that they crossed paths through these shared interests. Black was a keen observer and supporter of the performing arts, depicting many scenes involving musicians, actors and dancers. One of her best-known prints, Music(1927-28), was inspired by Jazz players. Bonython was heavily involved in the jazz scene and was considered an authority on the subject.

In his introduction for the 1976 exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, curator Ian North observed that Black 'later transcended a 1930s - 1940s realist style to produce works of very considerable power. In these late works Black entirely eschews her limited capacity for felicitous paint-handling and colour, subsuming it to an almost brutal honesty of expression, heightened (and not obscured as had sometimes happened in the late 1930s) by a modernist sense of interval and design. With qualifications too numerous to cite here, Black's career can be seen as a progression from Impressionism through Cubism to Realism, from international mainstream modernism to regionalism, from Significant Form to 'significant content', or even from elitist bourgeois Idealism to a greater democracy of style and content.'

1. Tracey Lock-Weir, Dorrit Black: Unseen Forces, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2014 p. 120
2. ibid