Paris, many an artist’s haven
IT IS NOT surprising Gerard Sekoto, Ernest Mancoba and generations of South African artists gravitated to Paris. Impressionism, cubism and surrealism took hold in the city at the turn of the last century. Ironically, progenitors of modernism looked to Africa for inspiration.
With white supremacism in full swing in South Africa, it made sense for black artists to escape. This didn’t always advance their art. There is a certain charm to the works Sekoto made in Paris. He famously played music in clubs until late and his vision of this city was delivered through a sort of dark smoky blue haze.
Mostly, it is artworks he made before he left in 1947 that are more readily valued. Such as Women in the Country and The Pink Road, which will be exhibited in Cape Town and Johannesburg ahead of the Strauss & Co auction on November 13, alongside works by prominent black artists while in Paris and their white contemporaries such as Irma Stern, Alexis Preller and Maggie Laubser. “The unobtrusive observer” is a phrase commonly associated with his art.
The display and sale of Women in the Country at the Strauss & Co Auction on November 13 is proving to be anything but an ordinary event. This is partially due to the fact that Sekoto works from this period rarely come up for sale – no one wants to part with them.
Women in the Country was painted during 1946 to 1947, while he was living in Eastwood before he left for Paris.
Executed in the early 1940s, The Pink Road is a more typical example of his art.
It is from his Sophiatown period and describes an urban scene infused by a warm yellow glow. Aside from his romantic palette, he doesn’t put any spin on the scene – there are no gangsters, musicians or artists – figures that would come to be associated with its heyday.
This relaxed vibe would be completely disrupted during forced-removals in the 1950s. Sekoto’s apparent objectivity allows him to be viewed as a sort of recorder of what would be lost. This is most probably why the art he produced in France is perceived to be less valuable.
For Mancoba, the reverse would prove the case; he escaped South Africa in the late 1930s and while in France he relinquished the desire to describe particularities. He
achieved this through an abstract language. Art should be universal and timeless, he observed. He succeeded; his abstract art is prominent in contemporary art platforms such as the 1:54; Contemporary African Art Fair, where his work was shown in London by a Danish gallery in 2016.
This year, a solo exhibition of his work was held at Aicon Gallery in New York. The auction includes an Untitled abstract work as well as two teak wood sculptures, Head of Mapedi and another Head which
appears like a mask.
While in Paris, visiting the photographer George Hallett in the late 1970s, Peter Clarke felt compelled to create the work Homage to Dumile – in reference to Dumile Feni, another black South African artist in self-imposed exile. Clarke was inspired by a series of Hallett’s photographs of Feni and a Unesco poster which in turn used Feni’s art as the basis. Clarke echoes this in his painting, which will also go on auction.
In it Clarke depicts a famous Feni work as a poster on a wall. Next to the characteristic Feni figure Clarke places text which reads: “to the brothers and sisters of the diaspora where ever they went wherever they might be.”
Highlights of the auction will be exhibited in Cape Town at the Gallery , One&Only Hotel, from yesterday until tomorrow. From November 10-12 they will be exhibited in Johannesburg at the Wanders Club in Illovo. The public is invited to join walkabouts ahead of the auction on November 13.
see www.strauss