In the early 1940s, South Australian artist Dorrit Black shared with Smart and others details of dynamic symmetry and the golden mean which she had studied overseas. Smart’s only Cubist work, Seated nude combines interlocking geometric shapes in a manner similar to Black’s House-roofs and flowers. In his 1996 autobiography, Smart acknowledged Black’s influence in understanding the process of composition-making: ‘Dorrit taught us above all to make pictures, to examine the bare bones of composition. The design, the composition, was all-important. The word that impressed was “when you make a picture”.’
