MODERN SKANDISHAKER
Artist Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, who died in 1984, is now about to have her major international breakthrough with exhibitions in Copenhagen and Paris. She lost her heart to a South-african. Together they fought for their art in extreme poverty.
White. Danish. Woman. Sculptor. Black. South African. Man. Artist. Continue with the year 1939 and add Paris. Two artists meet and a profound love emerges. Sonja Ferlov Mancoba is one part of the couple, and now she has been given the major exhibition her art so deserves. The National Gallery of Denmark (SMK) will exhibit her works from 7 February to 5 May 2019. The background for the exhibition is the yellowed newspaper cuttings, drawings, personal letters, conversations recorded on cassette tapes, class photos and books, which SMK received from Sonja Ferlov Mancoba’s studio and home in Paris in spring 2017. This created a unique opportunity to delve into new narratives about her life and art. The exhibition Sonja Ferlov Mancoba presents 140 works by the artist – several of which are original plaster and clay sculptures never exhibited before – together with drawings, paintings and collages from the years 1935-1984. The exhibition has been organised in partnership with Musée National d’art Moderne, Centre Pompidou in Paris, where it will be on show from 26 June to 23 September 2019. Here, her works will be displayed alongside those of her husband, South African Ernest Mancoba. Their lives became closely intertwined – a life of hardship and extreme poverty, racism and captivity, but also love against all odds. Sonja Ferlov was born in Copenhagen in 1911. At the beginning of the 1930s, the arrival of surrealism had a profound impact on the young, budding artist, as did her close friendships with Richard Mortensen and Ejler Bille, whom she met in 1931 when they all studied at the Copenhagen School of Crafts. In 1932, Ferlov, Bille and Mortensen had all progressed to the Royal Danish Academy of Art. Sonja Ferlov started her visual arts career as a painter, but only few of her earliest works predating 1935 have survived. She cited the branch sculptures she created the year after as her actual starting point. This was in the summer of 1935, when she was on the island of Bornholm and in the company of friends from the periodical Linien, including Mortensen and Bille. In 1982, director Torben Glarbo made a documentary about Ferlov in which she says: “We went on an excursion, Bille, Morten and I. And we collected branches. We carried large piles of branches to the house. We put them on the floor and discovered how each pile had its own distinct character. Each pile had found its own rhythm, shape. Morten’s was sharp and pointy, mine was round and Bille’s was usually gnarled. We each took our piles back home, and I filled an entire, little room. I would look at them, even at night. And I created small families.” The bird motif is a dominant feature of Sonja Ferlov’s early works. The bird, together with the egg, was a favourite motif among surrealists and can be seen in works by the likes of Max Ernst and Jean Arp as well as the Danes Bille and Mortensen. The surrealists used the bird motif as a symbol of (masculine) sexuality and the creative, the spiritual, while the egg appears as a symbol of fertility, new life, new beginnings. In Glarbo’s documentary, Sonja Ferlov explains how, as a schoolgirl, she experienced the joy of holding an African sculpture in her hands. One of her uncles had started collecting African sculptures, which led to his acquaintance with the couple Carl and Amalie Kjersmeier, who during the inter-war years built one of the most comprehensive private collections of African art at the time. In November
1936, Sonja Ferlov left for Paris, taking her interest in both African art and surrealism with her. In March 1937, she changed her address to 51, rue du Moulin Vert, and became a neighbour of Italian sculptor Alberto Giacometti. Her acquaintance with him became pivotal to Sonja Ferlov, both as a friend and as a role model, so it is only fitting that her sculptures at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art are exhibited not far from the Giacometti collection. Joan Miró, Picasso and Max Ernst are among the other great personalities she met back then. However, the biggest event was her meeting with South African artist Ernest Mancoba. Meeting at the beginning of 1939, they soon became lovers and moved in together at rue du Moulin Vert. Ernest Mancoba had come to Paris via London in the summer of 1938. He sailed on the ship All Alone, which to him became a symbol of western society, where solidarity and humanity are often forgotten in the quest for material goods. Before arriving in Europe, he had embarked on an artistic career in South Africa, but realised the impossibility of his living as a free person and working independently with his art in South Africa. In Paris, he met Danish ceramist Christian Poulsen, who introduced him to Bille at the end of January 1939, and it was through Bille that he and Sonja Ferlov met. The second time they met, she talked about Carl Kjersmeier’s collection and the impact it had made on her. “I don’t know what kind of destiny that brought me close to the ideal person,” Ernest Mancoba reminisced about Ferlov late in his life. To his relationship with Sonja Ferlov, Ernest Mancoba brought with him a life philosophy based on both Christian values and Ubuntu, a southern-african humanistic philosophy with which he had been brought up, as well as an intellectual education from his studies at the university in Fort Hare and a strong engagement in the world and the society he was part of. A few days after the war erupted in 1939, the young couple decided to leave Paris and travel to Denmark, but Ernest Mancoba was denied entry and had to stay in Paris. Sonja Ferlov had to go on her own. She chose to return to Paris already in February 1940. At her studio on rue du Moulin Vert in Montparnasse, in the complex where Alberto Giacometti had his studio and where Ernest Mancoba worked, she started working with clay for a large, semi-abstract sculpture that preoccupied her through the war and only attained its final shape at the end of 1946. Ernest Mancoba was detained in a German prison camp in St. Denis in northern Paris in 1940 and stayed there for four years until Paris was liberated in August 1944. They married there in 1942 in the presence of a German officer, but were only able to see each other when Sonja Ferlov was granted permission to visit him. They also suffered terrible financial hardship, and the organisation Cercle Francois Villon was the sole reason that she had a daily meal. In 1946, the couple became parents to a boy, Wonga, who later chose to pursue the same career as his parents. Denmark beckoned, and in 1947 the little family went to the small village of Kattinge by Roskilde, where Sonja Ferlov and Ernest Mancoba bought a small farm house. They both came into contact with the COBRA movement, Mancoba being called the black spot, and the couple attracted much attention. Danish magazine Billedbladet visited them – a blackwhite married couple was not only exotic but was also
frowned upon. It was during these years that Sonja worked on the sculpture “The Little Careful One”, which she completed in 1952, with the small resolute figure representing the connection between mother and child – an independent being that lived its own life on the plinth in front of the house. In autumn 1952, Sonja, Ernest and Wonga returned to France for good, settling in the small village of Oigny-en-valois, and which would become the setting for the family’s life and work for the next nine years. The house belonged to Sonja Ferlov’s close friend Clarisse Penso and her husband Joachim Penso, who had bought it as a summer cottage shortly before and now rented it at a reasonable price to the artists with meagre personal means. Sonja and Clarisse’s relationship was formed at the end of the 1930s when they and a mutual acquaintance, Rita Gueyfier, who modelled for Alberto Giacometti, met and became friends in his studio. It was Clarisse and not Ernest who was at the hospital when Wonga was born, and it was Clarisse and Penso, as her husband was called, who time and again came to their rescue with clothes, gifts for Wonga and money when times were worst. As she later wrote to her friend Troels Andersen: “The years in Oigny gave me great riches that I brought along for life and that became part of the foundation on which all of my later expression rests. The intimate relation to the massive untamed nature of the surrounding forest and the relation to the small, closed miniature community of the village, great persons, whose quiet, grey destiny I followed closely in these years gave me an abundance of life wisdom and poetry.” In the forest, she found yellow clay, which she felt was the best material she had held between her hands since sometime in the 1930s. She was able to use her thumb to work the soft, pliable clay in small bits – a technique she had seen in Giacometti and first used in the sculptures she created on Bornholm in 1951, but which the clay inspired her to use in earnest during this period. The nubbly or scaly surface is distinctive of the few works that survived the years in Oigny. Indeed, the sculptures’ almost vibrant appearance can largely be ascribed to her exploration of the properties of the soft, yellow clay and the opportunities it created for structuring and modelling. However, the years were marked by deep poverty. The following decade, she spent regaining her footing and resolving what her attitude to art, life and the surrounding society was: “Well, you have to look forward,” she wrote, “and I have maintained faith that one day we will succeed in creating a powerful expression for what we want to say.” Many of her major works were created here. Despite having acquired French citizenship, the ties to Denmark remained intact, and the couple had a joint exhibition in Denmark in 1977. In her last letters, she expressed a longing to “get properly back into working with sculptures again”, but in vain. With failing health and after several hospital admissions in a fight with cancer, she died on 17 December 1984 at a Paris hospital. She was buried in Assistens Kirkegaard in Copenhagen – close to where H.C. Andersen is buried. The perfect spot, for like in the fairy tale she is now turning from an ugly duckling into a swan. Sources: Dorthe Aagesen and Mikkel Borg: Sonja Ferlov Mancoba: The human, voices and the space. Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, Troels Andersen. Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, Sculptures, Art Museum of Northern Jutland. Art Museum of Holstebro, Art Museum of Fuenen.