Elder Wing of Australian Art: Audio Described Tour
Work 11 of 15

Adelaide-born Dorrit Black was a painter and printmaker who completed her formal studies at the South Australian School of Arts and Crafts in around 1914 and then continued her training in Sydney at Julian Ashton’s Sydney Art School. By 1927 she was studying modern art in London and the following year her painting practice was transformed when she studied cubism in Paris. After coming back to Australia in late 1929, she committed her life to advocating modern art through her own art and teaching. In 1931 she established the Modern Art Centre in Margaret Street, Sydney and became the first woman in Australia to run an art gallery. She later returned to live in Adelaide and in 1939 she designed and built her own home and studio in Magill, an Adelaide foothills suburb, east of the city.

The Bridge is an oil painting by Black in 1930 which depicts the Sydney Harbour Bridge under construction. Painted immediately after completing her cubism lessons in France, The Bridge is regarded as Australia’s earliest cubist landscape painting. Although Black has fragmented and simplified elements to conform to geometry, the scene is cohesive and identifiable. The view is taken from Sydney’s Balls Head reserve and captures a side elevation of the two incomplete curved arches of the bridge, the harbour waters in the centre and houses in the foreground.

Cleverly, Black has composed this composition so that our eye moves across the picture plane from early morning dawn on left, to evening on the right. In this way, she’s referencing the cyclical nature of time and modern progress. The span of time is further symbolised through the inclusion of a nineteenth century masted clipper anchored in the harbour and the modern electricity pole. The artist’s depiction of the Bridge captures a spirit of excitement, and celebrates the dramatic engineering advancements being made during the Great Depression and giving the Sydney community hope for the future.

Officially opened in 1932 the Sydney Harbour Bridge remains the world’s largest steel arch bridge and was inspiration for many artists during the time including Harold Cazneaux, Grace Cossington Smith, Frank Hinder and Margaret Preston. 

The Bridge by Australian artist Dorrit Black is a landscape format oil painting on canvas. Painted in 1930, it is 60 cm high and 81 cm wide.

The painting depicts the water, the bridge and the shoreline of Sydney Harbour in the late 1920s when the bridge was still under construction.

Created with minimal details in a cubist style, the artist has simplified the scene into geometric coloured shapes.

The bridge, in the upper third of the painting, is dark grey against a blue, white and grey coloured sky.

The two halves of the incomplete bridge, stretching out from opposite peninsulas of land are yet to meet, leaving an open gap against the sky in the upper centre of the painting.

In the upper left is the road and deck, the triangular-grid of reinforcing steel and the pylon of the left side of the bridge, depicted simply by a horizontal line, criss-crossed fine lines, and a trapezium. Atop the pylon is the half-constructed metal structure of a crane, finely painted criss-crossed lines.

The arch of the bridge is depicted by two thicker grey lines, slightly curved and almost parallel, from the right of the pylon and ending in the sky in the upper centre of the painting. Steel girders, a grid of finer painted lines criss-cross between them.

In the upper right of the painting, mirroring the shape and scale of the left side, the right side of the bridge is depicted as a horizontal rectangle that merges the road, deck, girders and pylon into its solid mass. The right arch faces, but does not meet, its companion on the other side, only its upper half is criss-crossed with gridded painted lines.

Across the lower third of the painting, buildings, sunlit vegetation and grassy hills form the closest shoreline.

In the lower left, round, verdant bushes cluster around a telegraph pole. In the lower centre, are two pink buildings with high triangular gables and brown rooves. One building has a white chimney, a green door and two narrow windows. The other building is lower down with only the roof in view.

Between the foreground vegetation and buildings, and the distant bridge, are the waters of the harbour. Curving lines divide the water into sail-like blue and green shapes, and wriggly horizontal lines signify ripples.

Peninsulas of land edge into the water. On the right a jetty and a low green hill. On the left a rounded green hill and a small pink rectangular boathouse, the location near the bridge where the construction of the Opera House would start in 1958.

A sailing ship, a brown and black hull, five parallel vertical masts but no sails, sits low in the water in the middle left of the painting.

The painting is signed at the lower left, ‘Dorrit Black’.