Strauss & co - 10 November 2014, Johannesburg

102 147 Cecil Edwin Frans SKOTNES south african 1926–2009 Totem signed; dated 1971 on the underside carved, incised and painted wood height: 98 cm, including base R80 000–120 000 notes Throughout his professional career Cecil Skotnes applied himself to producing architectural features – notably murals, doors and interior panels – for churches, schools, businesses and private homes. It is demeaning to think of these works simply as decorative elements. In his book Johannesburg Style , architectural critic Clive Chipkin situates these interventions within a broader sweep of experimentation that helped formalise a ‘new domestic vernacular architecture’ in post war Johannesburg. 1 The artist’s totems are a product of this particular trajectory. In the late 1960s, by which time his abstracted figurative style had settled into a mature idiom, Skotnes began producing wood panels marked by their extreme verticality and figural distortion. Often produced using long wooden beams, Skotnes described these works using the word totem, a concession to the generic influence of North American cultures on his practice. A great many of these works tended to be totemic murals offering proscribed points of viewing when compared with this freely navigable columnar form. Whether murals affixed to walls or freestanding objects, Skotnes’s totems generally adopted one of two representational strategies: they either depicted ‘tall, attenuated figures’or, as in this work, aggregated a number of vividly coloured images in a ‘tall, vertical array’. 2 Unlike the gouged and porous totems produced by architect and artist Monty Sack during the same period, Skotnes did not fully treat his freestanding totems as sculptural pieces. The close affinity, in style and geometry, of this work to his incised paintings is self-evident. Ultimately, his totems remained paintings, albeit highly applied ones. Of note, the post war collector John Schlesinger held a Skotnes totem in his large Schlesinger South African Art Collection, donated to the Wits Art Museum in 1979. 1. Chipkin, Clive (1993) Johannesburg Style , Cape Town: David Philip. Page 294. 2. Harmsen, Frieda (1996) ‘Artist Resolute’, in Cecil Skotnes , Cape Town: Cecil Skotnes. Page 28. ©The Estate of Cecil Skotnes | DALRO