History of SA art, on the block

Private art collectors don’t often get the chance to buy museum-quality works. But a two-day hybrid auction, conducted by Strauss & Co on November 7 and 8, is just that rare opportunity.

As it is, the selection of art on the block is something of a neat essay on the history of SA art over the past century. Alastair Meredith, who heads Strauss & Co’s art department, believes the story of SA art — colonial, modernist or contemporary — is dominated by attempts to interpret Africa. Many of the pieces up for sale speak directly to that.

"I would argue that these kinds of works [have enormous potential to] generate conversation in a museum context," he says.

The headline works are from JH Pierneef and Alexis Preller, artists known for fetching staggering prices. Preller’s Boy with a Crocodile fetched R10.4m at Strauss & Co’s spring sale, and his Adam and Eve, in the "cover lot" of this auction, is expected to fetch R7.6m-R8m.

Meredith says the standout Pierneef on sale — Bushveld, Pafuri — "is one of the last great late-period masterpieces", and has a pre-sale estimate of R8m-R10m. This, he says, was one of the artist’s "last big efforts" in the early 1950s.

Pierneef, who died in 1957 at 71, made his name as the grand pioneer of SA modernist landscape painting. Famously, he sold his first painting in 1910 for the princely sum of R6.10, but his reputation soon grew, to the extent that today his work adorns SA House in Trafalgar Square.

Bushveld, Pafuri was completed late in his career when Pierneef steered clear of large works.

His health was failing, and he was "enormously overworked", says Meredith. But he was also short of money. "This is him summoning all his energy and producing an absolutely spectacular painting late in his life," says Meredith.

The work is visually potent: it captures the luminous greens and phosphorescent light in a clearing in the bushveld around the time of a storm. "It almost looks like someone lit a flare above the landscape," says Meredith. "It’s a knockout picture … You get a sense of what a brilliant painter he could be."

Though painted in the same decade, the other headline lot, Preller’s Adam and Eve, is an entirely different artistic project. Preller was 25 years younger than Pierneef, and died in 1975 at the age of 64.

The two artists’ passions were a world apart. Whereas Pierneef mythologised the African landscape, Preller delved into African mythology itself. His overarching project was an attempt to create his own "visual myth" of Africa, as Meredith puts it, "with its own players and characters and casts and symbols".

In Adam and Eve, he places a pair of Dogon sculptures at the centre of Christian mythology. This is one of three closely related works: one of the others, The Garden of Eden, is in the Pretoria Art Gallery.

It represents a specific moment in SA art. Whereas the earlier 20th-century modernist Irma Stern was fascinated by Africa’s landscape, people and art, she used artefacts as props in her still-life paintings. But Preller is "doing something completely different", says Meredith — objects aren’t merely themselves.

Kentridge’s Top Star

While Adam and Eve and Bushveld, Pafuri are visually arresting, there are other compelling works on auction too. In particular, William Kentridge’s iconic image of the Top Star drive-in from his film Other Faces is expected to go for R1.8m-R2.4m.

There are also selections from George Pemba, Edoardo Villa, Peter Clarke, Lucas Sithole, Sydney Kumalo and Gregoire Boonzaier.

The sculptures of the Italian-born Villa offer another mode of engagement with Africa. "He’s doing something similar to Preller, [but] about 10 years later," says Meredith.

In Villa’s totemic African Mask I and II, Meredith says, "he’s not just looking at an African mask, he’s completely reinterpreting it with a much more abstract, angular, simplified aesthetic".

This modernist take on traditional African art wasn’t exclusively the terrain of white artists. The likes of Sithole and Kumalo, local black artists represented in this auction, were central to the development of African modernism, too.

One particularly interesting work under the hammer is Hugging Nude, a bronze by Kumalo cast in Switzerland. Sithole’s standout sculpture on auction, The Bison, is executed in wood. Rather than conceptualise forms from scratch, Sithole "found form" in existing objects, in this case a mass of roots and tree trunk. "That’s a much more traditional African kind of approach to sculpture," says Meredith.

Social critique

It’s interesting to consider one of Clarke’s works, Lovers, which has what Meredith describes as a "clear political edge" — copulating figures taunt apartheid laws in the context of interracial sex and homosexuality. "There’s this fabulous ambiguity," says Meredith. "Is it a same-sex couple? Is it a same-race couple? Is it two black men? Is it a black man and a white woman? There’s just enough doubt … to make a point that this was illegal."

Meredith sees a similarly ambiguity in Pemba’s Open Air Concert, which he says is "without doubt a museum-grade picture".

"Superficially, it just looks like a wonderful happy outdoor concert. The people are relaxing in the shade ... It’s a happy scene, but when we look at the details, you start to see an element of state control."

The shadowy presence of a policeman and his dog figure in the background, for example. "You’ve got these incredible social undertones," he says. "It’s a resistance picture without obviously being a resistance picture."

You could say the same of Boonzaier’s Demolition, District Six, which depicts a collapsing house 10 years after the forced removals under the Group Areas Act.

There is a similar theme in Kentridge’s depiction of the widely recognisable Top Star drive-in in Joburg. "People who have grown up on the highveld know these mine dumps and drive-in screens," says Meredith. "Empty billboards are part of the landscape, but at the same time, in a broader context, it’s about control, authority, propaganda."

The Top Star image is central in Kentridge’s wider postcolonial deconstruction of the social, political and physical landscape of Joburg and SA. You could even see it as rounding on the landscape tradition exemplified by Pierneef.

Modern, postwar, contemporary art auction, Strauss & Co, November 7-8