Depot workers, c.1940 – 42
Dorrit Black
oil on canvas on cardboard
46.0 x 61.0 cm
signed lower right: Dorrit Black
Estate of the artist, Adelaide
Thence by descent
Helen Finlayson (née Black), Adelaide, 1951 [the artist's sister]
Margaret Michelmore (née Finlayson), Adelaide, a gift from the above
Estate of the above, Adelaide
Autumn Exhibition, Royal South Australian Society of Arts, Adelaide, 3 – 21 April 1951, cat. 6 (label attached verso)
Dorrit Black (1891 – 1951), Royal South Australian Society of Arts, Adelaide, 24 April – 15 May 2011, cat. 51 (label attached verso, as ‘Depot Workers/The Cloth Cutters’)
Dorrit Black: Unseen Forces, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 14 June – 7 September 2014 (as ‘The Cloth Cutters’)
North, I., The Art of Dorrit Black, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, and Macmillan, South Melbourne, 1979, cat. 0.78, p. 123 (as ‘The Cloth Cutters’)
Lock, T., Dorrit Black, Unseen Forces, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2014, pp. 124, 128 (illus., as ‘The Cloth Cutters’), 192 (illus.)
While Australia sent thousands of soldiers to fight in the First and Second World Wars, the men and women who stayed at home mobilised and worked in whatever ways they could to support them. Grace Cossington Smith’s painting, The sock knitter, 1915 (Art Gallery of New South Wales) has come to symbolise the combined efforts of the many women who knitted, quilted and sewed during the Great War, making functional items that were sent to the troops overseas. Dorrit Black’s colour linocut, The wool quilt makers, 1940 – 41, which depicts a group of volunteer women making quilts for the Red Cross, shows that this tradition continued during the Second World War. Black also documented other aspects of life during wartime in her prints – from the light-hearted image, At the cafeteria, c.1943, to the more sombre, Naval funeral, c.1945 – and in addition to depicting these activities on the home front, she actively contributed to the war effort as a local air-raid warden.
There is a sense of order and calm productivity in Depot workers, c.1940 – 42, one of a small group of paintings depicting people at work that Black made during the Second World War. Three women and a lone man, whose grey hair identifies him as too old to enlist, work together, cutting and packing pieces of cloth. Ian North has highlighted the focus and strength embodied in the figures of shearers that Black depicted in another of these works, The wool shed, 1939, (private collection), and here too, her respect for her subjects and the dignity of their labour is clear.1 By this time, the cubist-inspired abstraction of Black’s earlier work had been replaced by a much more direct painterly approach reflecting her maturity and artistic confidence and what she later characterised as ‘a different kind of realism, based on all I have learned in the interval of constructive and rhythmical design.’2
1. North, I., The Art of Dorrit Black, Macmillan Australia & the Art Gallery of South Australia, South Melbourne, 1979, p. 91
2. Foreword by the artist, Dorrit Black exhibition catalogue, Royal South Australian Society of Arts Gallery, 1945, cited in Lock, T., Dorrit Black: unseen forces, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2014, p. 134
KIRSTY GRANT