The shy gardener who became SA’s ‘black Pierneef ’
PLACE OF WORK: ’Lokshoek Johannesburg’
THE first black artist to have his work exhibited in the South African National Gallery was a self-taught painter who made his living as a gardener.
Born in 1903 in Sekhukhuneland, Moses Tladi was the son of a traditional healer and a potter. He came to Johannesburg in the 1920s looking for work and found a job as a gardener for Herbert Read, a mining administrator and owner of the now-demolished Lokshoek house in Parktown.
Read, a keen art appreciator and collector, discovered Tladi’s artistic talent, gave him materials and the use of a carriage house on the property as a studio, and, together with his friend, former mayor of Johannesburg Howard Pim, promoted Tladi’s work at several exhibitions.
His work was included in the First Annual Exhibition of Contemporary National Art at the National Gallery in Cape Town in 1931 and won the first and second prizes for landscape painting at the Grahamstown Arts and Craft Festival Exhibition the following year.
But by the 1950s Tladi had disappeared from public view and the annals of South African art history. That remained the case until Read’s granddaughter Angela Read Lloyd started to ask questions about who had painted many of the pictures on the walls of the family home which she had grown up with and been fascinated by.
After years of detective work and research, Read Lloyd pieced together the story of the man who had planted the trees in the RESERVED MAN: The artist Moses Tladi garden. She found as many of his works as she could. The story of her investigation and the man at its centre was published in 2009 as The Artist in the Garden. The book sparked huge interest in Tladi and his work.
“Unearthed”, a contextual exhibition of roughly 30 of Tladi’s landscapes, is currently on at the National Gallery. It provides a poignant and heartbreaking look at an artist who was on his way to developing his own unique style before the violent imposition of apartheid destroyed both his way of life and his will to create.
It places his work alongside the landscape paintings of his better-known contemporaries, artists such as Gerard Bhengu, Sydney Carter, George Pemba, Dorothy Kay, John Koenakeefe Mohl and JH Pierneef, and shows both his ability and his unfulfilled potential.
An accompanying documentary includes interviews with Read Lloyd and Tladi’s daughter Mmapula Small. She and her sister Rekiloe, who died last year, were instrumental in locating many of Tladi’s paintings, a large number of which had hung on the walls of the family’s houses in Soweto and London. They shared with Read Lloyd information on their father’s life.
There is also a wall text in which curator Andrea Lewis shows, through microscopic investigation of the paintings, the detail of Tladi’s technique, helping to debunk impressions of him as a “naïve native artist” working simply by instinct.
While there are a number of known Tladi paintings that depict flowers and figures, Lewis says that the exhibition chose to focus on his landscapes because “the outdoors, the sound, the trees, these were the things that inspired Moses”.
His daughters recall that he could be quiet and reserved, and was happiest when he was outdoors, painting.
The scenes depicted range from views of Lokshoek to
CAPTURED LIGHT: ’No 1 Crown Mines’
NATURAL SPACE: ‘Landscape’, a watercolour Craighall Park, Rivonia, the Magaliesberg and Kroonstad, where Tladi was stationed for his army service during World War 2.
Although he lived briefly in Sophiatown, Tladi never painted township scenes, preferring the landscape subject matter that was the prevailing trend in South African painting in the 1930s and ’40s.
Influenced by the attempts to capture light in the works of Impressionists such as Claude Monet and Henri-Joseph Harpignies, which he had seen in the Johannesburg Art Gallery with Pim, Tladi produced work that is distinctive in its sensitivity to changes in light at different times of the day, and to what the exhibition describes as the “fleeting qualities of nature”.
In the years before the introduction of the Group Areas Act, Tladi built his family a house in Kensington B, near Ferndale. An unfinished painting of the house tells a sad story of the end of a dream for Tladi and his family.
In 1956 the Tladi family were forcibly removed from their house and relocated to Soweto. In anger at this injustice Tladi reportedly cut down the trees he had grown in Kensington, packed up his paints in a box and never opened it again. He died in 1959.
According to Lewis, “his family scattered and went to London and left the box behind in an attic. He disappeared from the history books.”
It’s a comparatively small exhibition and Tladi is not quite Henri Rousseau — the selftaught French customs officer whose primitive style was ridiculed in his lifetime but which is now considered hugely valuable to the evolution of European painting — but his work demonstrates a keen eye, a delicate touch and a love of the South African landscape, which, unlike its government, rejuvenated rather than crushed his creative expression.
It brings him firmly back into the history of South African art and sheds a welcome light on a tragically neglected but undeniably talented painter.
“Moses Tladi Unearthed” is at Iziko South African National Gallery until March 16 2016
An unfinished painting of the house tells a sad story of the end of a dream for Tladi and his family