Dorrit Black briefly studied in Adelaide before moving to Sydney in 1915. During the 1920s she became increasingly focused on ‘modernising’ her practice and in 1927 she left for Europe in order to acquire ‘a definite understanding of the aims and methods of the modern movement and in particular, the cubists’.

In London she studied at Claude Flight’s Grosvenor School, making her first colour linocuts. The following year she travelled to Europe, studying with Andre Lhote in Paris and later with cubist painter Albert Gleizes, before returning to Sydney in 1929. She held her first solo exhibition in Sydney at the Macquarie Galleries, exhibiting works that declared the cubist-inspired aesthetics she had developed while overseas.

This view is from Elizabeth Street facing north towards St James Road as it curves towards Queens Square. Several of the structures in this image are visible today, including the spire of St James Church, King Street courts and the heavy foliage of a Moreton Bay fig in Hyde Park. Black reduced these forms to very basic geometric shapes in a compressed picture plane, influenced by the principles of cubism.

Music is among Dorrit Black’s most dynamic compositions. It was inspired by a jazz night at the Dominion Arts Club, London. One of her earliest prints, it was made while Black was studying at Claude Flight’s Grosvenor School and was exhibited in the first exhibition of linocuts held in Britain, at the Redfern Gallery in 1929.

‘Black boys’ is the common name for the Xanthorrhoea genus of grasstree. This distinctively Australia subject was inspired by vegetation on the artist’s uncle’s farm, ‘Woodenup’, in the Kojunup region of Western Australia.

This starkly graphic linocut presents the view at night from Dorrit Black’s Sydney art school, the Modern Art Centre, in Margaret Street, which she operated from 1932 to 1935. The starkly reduced architectural forms reflect the influence of cubism, which Black had studied in France under Andre Lhote and Albert Gleizes, while the strong contrasts of black and white emphasise transformation of the city at night, lit only by streetlights or the moon. Black also exhibited this print under the title Reconstructions, Wynyard Square, which explains the diagonal crane form in the centre of the image.

This print was reproduced in Harry Tatlock Miller’s modernist literary and art journal Manuscripts in November 1932. Exhibited nearby are the preparatory pencil drawing and lino block used in its printing.

Ailsa Lee Brown was born in Sydney and studied under Thea Proctor and Adelaide Perry at the Julian Ashton Art School. Her prints emphasised design, surface patterning, flattened forms and decorative detail, typical of Sydney modernism at the time. Brown abandoned linocuts in favour of wood engravings in 1936, making several in the late 1930s.

This is a rare industrial subject for the artist; her focus is on the construction workers and their equipment, the print displaying her command of modernist design principles in the utilisation of compositional devices such as strong diagonals, and hatching to create volume and tone.

Vera Blackburn grew up in an art-loving family in Sydney and first made linocuts under the direction of Thea Proctor, and later at Adelaide Perry’s art school.

This image was inspired by a passage in Tchaikovsky’s music for the ballet Swan Lake as well as an Irish legend, the Children of Lir, in which children were transformed into swans.

The dark shadows cast by the curbside palm fronds in this graphically rhythmical print evoke the unforgiving light of a Sydney summer. Vera Blackburn made it within a couple of years of learning linocutting from Thea Proctor, just before she left for England, where she was to remain for the rest of her life.

Best remembered for his elegant and witty montages of domestic objects and flowers in quasi-surreal still-life paintings, Adrian Feint was also a designer, printmaker and illustrator, creating covers for Art in Australia and The Home magazines and an important body of bookplates.

Feint first exhibited woodcuts and wood engravings while a student of Thea Proctor in the late 1920s. He made two versions of this image; the Gallery has the key (black) and colour blocks for another version that is slightly larger in size, which has a few small differences in the image. The sculpture depicted is a bronze Shiva - a Hindu god, rather than the ‘goddess’ of the title.

The print echoes the self-consciously tasteful imagery of Proctor’s eclectic still-life compositions, although it was made several years after Feint and Proctor quarrelled and may be a barbed commentary on her work, rather than a respectful homage.

Paul Haefliger arrived in Sydney as a teenager with his family and studied at the Julian Ashton Art School in the 1930s, before travelling to London where he studied with British modernist painters Bernard Meninsky and Mark Gertler. He was a lifelong supporter of modernism in Australia through his work as an artist and critic.

Lyrebird was made before he left Sydney for Europe and reveals the influence of Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints in its elegant design, compressed picture plane and colouring. Haefliger made a small number of other prints in the Japanese manner, including Kusatsu hot springs, Japan 1932 and a self-portrait Paul 1935, both in the National Gallery of Australia collection.

Ethleen Palmer studied at East Sydney Technical College and began experimenting with relief printmaking in 1933. She was influenced by Japanese prints and the work of Austrian artist Norbertine Bresslern-Roth, whose work was shown in Sydney in the mid 1920s.

Palmer exhibited her first prints in 1933 at the Society of Arts and Crafts in Sydney, and continued to experiment with techniques throughout the decade. In the late 1940s she was one of the first Australian artists to experiment with screen prints, some of which are reproduced here.

Adelaide Perry was a key figure in the promotion of linocut in Sydney in the 1920s. Her works were characterised by strong, rhythmic design and sharp graphic contrasts of black and white. A respected and popular teacher, she taught many artists how to make linocuts, first at the Julian Ashton Art School and later at her own school, established in Bridge Street in 1933.

This is the largest of Perry’s linocuts and shows the Sydney Harbour Bridge under construction. The sky, harbour and foreground trees surge with the same energy as the passing ferries, echoing the dynamic curves of the bridge. This engineering marvel was fascinating to many of her contemporaries, who saw in it the embodiment of modern industrial progress.

This drawing for the linocut Kirribilli (The little steamer) is notable because the image appears in the same orientation as the final print. In transferring the image to the linoblock for cutting, the artist would have needed to reverse the image, perhaps through the use of a transitional drawing, now lost.

Mabel Pye studied at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, Melbourne, where she was a contemporary of Adelaide Perry, Ethel Spowers and Napier Waller. She made her first colour linocuts in the early 1930s, exhibiting them over a six-year period with the Victorian Artists Society.

Ethel Spowers came from a wealthy Mebourne family, affording her the opportunity for regular travel to Europe for leisure and study. She was among a small group of artists instrumental in promoting the modern colour linocut in Australia in the 1930s, having studied the medium in Europe.

Spowers’ first colour prints were made in the Japanese manner, brushing ink on the block so it printed with a painterly texture. In 1928 she enrolled at Claude Flight’s Grosvenor School in London, which signalled a change in her work; her colours became lighter, her forms more rhythmical and repetitive. Her subjects were taken from everyday life, including children at play and crowded city streets.

Upon her return to Australia, Spowers acted as Claude Flight’s agent and, with Dorrit Black and Eveline Syme, promoted his work and teachings through a number of exhibitions, especially in Melbourne.

The people in this delightful print become one mass as they huddle together in driving rain under the domes of sheltering umbrellas. The only face visible is that of a downcast child, her red glove a counterpoint to the red stripes of her companion’s umbrella. This was one of Spowers’ best received prints; when she exhibited it in London in 1930, impressions were aquired by both the British Musuem and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

This is one of only four wood engravings made by Spowers in London between 1929 and 1932. While its size and monochromatic appearance contrasts with her linocuts of the same period, it shares something of their emphasis on repetition, dynamic movement and simplified form. Spowers repeated this composition in two other colour linocuts, The plough 1928 and Birds following a plough 1933, indicating it was a favourite.

Eveline Syme studied art in Paris in the early 1920s, including at Andre Lhote’s school in Montparnasse, where she learnt the principles of cubism. She began making colour linocuts in 1927, taught by her friend and contemporary Ethel Spowers. She enrolled at Claude Flight’s Grosvenor School in London after reading his publication Lino-cuts (1927), of which she later wrote: *Here was something new and different… I had seen nothing more vital and essentially ‘modern’ in the best sense of the word than the reproductions shown. *

This classic image of a tram wending its way through the streets of Sydney shows the influence of Japanese woodblock prints, in its compositional flatness and high viewpoint.

New Zealander Frank Weitzel arrived in Sydney in the late 1920s after studying variously in San Francisco, New York and Munich. He quickly gained a reputation with the local avant-garde for his sculpture, linocuts, textile and furniture design; his short time in Sydney had a disproportionate influence on the development of local modernism. Weitzel made a number of strongly graphic linocuts of urban subjects while living here including the Harbour Bridge, inner-city streets and slums.

Weitzel was ‘warmly supported’ by Dorrit Black, who is thought to have introduced him to Claude Flight, with whom he was studying by 1930. It was at Flight’s Grosvenor School that Weitzel extended his printmaking into multiple block colour prints, including this work and its companion Abstract design 2. Both reveal the influence of futurism and cubism and the tragic promise of a young artist, cut off through his untimely death in 1932.