Heita Bra Khehla!
The late artist Louis Khehla Maqhubela was in his true element in abstract avant gardism
It is not an easy task to pay tribute to Bra Khehla Maqhubela. But, as observed by John Peffer, “All of his works, early and late, are technically and intellectually precise. They are not ‘intuitive’. They are oblique, not iconic, and they do not give up their secrets. They are reticent, like Louis Maqhubela the man.”
Louis Khehla Maqhubela (19392021) was one of the last of the great masters of South Africa’s modernist painting tradition. But it would do a disservice to Maqhubela if he waere to be categorised into the single hero narrative. Clearly, he has emerged as a master painter and printmaker among many other equally eloquent great craftsmen of his generation.
Given the context of apartheid in which they worked, Maqhubela and his peers launched projects such as Thupelo Arts Workshop, an enabling self-help institution for Black artists to deconstruct what could have been an aesthetic ghetto of “township art”. They created and taught in the art institutions that made the next generation of Black artists possible: the Federated Union of Black Artists (Fuba) Academy, the Bag Factory, and the earlier Polly Street Art Centre.
It is this strategic collaboration, the realignment of creative ideas, and search of styles that produced some of the greatest contemporary Black artists of our time. It birthed a new modernism, led by Durant Sihlali and David Koloane.
Without claiming credit, Maqhubela was at the centre, among the leading figures ushering in a far bigger movement that the current generation of artists can now lokk back at to pinpoint and define the South African Black aesthetic beyond what could have been achieved in a narrow framework of “township art” and its accompanying marginalisation.
The creative journey of Maqhubela is not a single story. He was a student of Cecil Scotness, but also a major influencer in his own right; he took along and inspired fellow avant-gardists, amongst others, Koloane, who was a schoolmate at Orlando High in the 1950s. Maqhubela not only gave Koloane his first box of paints and taught him basic art instruction, but later were all able to engage with Bill Ainslie to ignite the great Black aesthetic of New Wave African Modernist abstract art at Fuba.
Maqhubela’s art style was in constant motion beyond the constraint of thematic dead ends , even though when we notice an artist who understood spiritual issues. But Christian iconography did not confine his imagination, and he expanded on the sociopolitical subtexts featured in his early work. Maqhubela’s piece Peter’s Denial, a conté and mixed media work from 1966, contained a coded political statement of copping-out and by spineless individuals in the face of South African security police harassment.
With the rhythm and rise of Black Consciousness in early 1970s, his work became rebellious, as well as Afrocentric, defiantly connecting to the James Brown echo, “Say it Loud I’m Black and I’m Proud.” The 1980s saw Maqhubela moving into bolder layerings of paint on canvass, his impastos becoming even more abstract and “secretive” in their coded messaging and signification. He was in his true element of abstract avant gardism.
Maqhubela was actually very political, but not the flag-waving type; if anything, he was non-sectarian in tendency. In 1983, he participated in the Pitso Association of Black South Artists and Writers conversations at the Africa Centre London, a broadbased solidarity dialogue group dealing and responding to the political upheaval in the country at the time.
He went on to attend Goldsmiths College (1984-85) and the Slade School of Art (1985-88). At the Slade he was possibly search of perfecting and confirming his aesthetic technique, he also further developed his printmaking and eloquently produced a body etchings considered some of the best works of his career.
The growth of a painter can abe likened to that of a musician. Composition is at the centre of their imagination and they are not confined to a single genre or structure.
The same can be said of art: the experimental drive of one’s palette or colour layering is always in motion. This is in many ways Maqhubela’s journey. He interacted with different styles at different points in his work: he could be Cubist playing with abstract geometric forms and colour, his influences were not mere copycat, although one could read affinities with Paul Klee. But make no mistake it all was genuinely simply Maqhubela.
Maqhubela’s encounter with European artists and abstract painting embolden him to think even to higher creative expressions beyond the obvious meanings of signification or locating his identity in geographic specificity.
He became an artist at play, answerable to his natural instinct. Although conscious to his mission of modernist abstraction expression, he remained a true son of the African soil. That is why in his anger and disappointment at the attempted forgery and devaluation of his work by certain crooked gallerist and auctioneers Bra Khehla’s take was that “the forgers were obviously trying to create a myth that Maqhubela started off his career as a naïve Sunday painter who was (and still is) incapable of identifying his own paintings. They hoped to reinforce this parallel universe ‘alternative truth’ by flooding the market with this mass produced … replicas that ‘forgetful Old Codger Louie’ had authenticated’
A retrospective, curated by Marilyn Martin, titled A Vigil of Departure: Khehla Maqhubela 1960-2010 for the Standard Bank Gallery, became a safe return home to relocate him in South African art history — a monument to a great artist, an open book ready to be read about a county’s history of Black art. Surely this was not the last we will hear of him: future generations will hopefully genuflect and salute “Heita Bra Khehla!”