Dorrit Black, Mirmande, 1934 by Atelier Liesjes

About "Dorrit Black, Mirmande, 1934"

by Atelier Liesjes

About the artwork

View of Mirmande with surrounding hills. Mirmande is a town in the French department of Drôme (Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region). The town is part of the arrondissement of Valence. Mirmande has been recognized by Les Plus Beaux Villages de France as one of the most beautiful villages in France.

Black first traveled to Mirmande in southern France in 1928 when she enrolled in the Lhote summer school with her artist colleagues Grace Crowley and Anne Dangar. It was here that Black first experimented with landscape painting according to Lhote's compositional principles of cubist-inspired geometry; where, as Lhote believed, the broken planes of cubist construction were eventually integrated into a rhythmically driven whole.

Mirmande represents the subject with which Black first interrogated ideas about painting the modern landscape. In "Mirmande (and surrounding hills)," we see the aesthetic elements she would apply to her later Australian landscapes: indelibly solid, driven by a dynamic, rhythmic structure, and colored in earthy somber tones. Black applied these characteristics to give her landscapes a sense of somber monumentality and to evoke the underlying and eternally vital forces of nature.

Dorothea Foster Black (December 23, 1891 - September 13, 1951) was an Australian painter and graphic artist of the modernist school, known as a pioneer of modernism in Australia.

Women were pioneers of modernism in Australia, and Black is recognized as a major force in educating Australians in the appreciation of modern art.