(Landscape)

The Australian artist Mary Cockburn Mercer spent much of her schooling life in Europe. At age 17, she yearned for the life of bohemian Paris and fled to Montparnasse where she mingled with the district’s avant garde writers, poets and artists. Mercer is rumoured to have worked with Chagall and Picasso in the years around World War I, and in the early 1920s studied and worked with the cubist painter André Lhote, who would later teach some of the pioneering artists of Australian modernism including Grace Crowley, Anne Dangar and Dorrit Black.

By 1922 Mercer moved to Cassis in the south of France where she built a house on the cliff tops. It was here that she is thought to have painted '(Landscape)'. There is little known of Mercer’s paintings from this period but '(Landscape)' tells of her embrace of cubism in interpreting her local landscape forms. The influence of Lhote is evident in the work’s geometric structure, where fractured planes are ultimately integrated into a rhythmically driven whole. The painting however is distinct in Mercer’s attention to the dynamic repetition of forms; a sense of movement that ignites the composition, as well as her brooding palette of purple, green landscape hues.

Following her years in Cassis, Mercer continued to live a peripatetic life, moving between Italy, Spain (where she became caught up in the Spanish Civil War), Tahiti and Guam before returning to Melbourne in 1938. She maintained something of the geometric compositional scaffolding, but shed the more overt cubist references that are apparent in '(Landscape)'. In Australia, Mercer regularly exhibited with the newly formed Contemporary Art Society, although there are relatively few known works that remain from her oeuvre. She returned to France late in life and died there in 1963.