Strauss & co - 10 November 2014, Johannesburg

116 159 Sydney Alex KUMALO south african 1935–1988 Madala V inscribed with the artist’s name, title, ‘was shown at the Biennale São Paulo 1967’and numbered IV/X on a label adhered to the underside bronze with a brown patina, mounted on a wooden base height:44,5 cm, including base R180 000–240 000 exhibited The Egon Geunther Gallery, Johannesburg São Paulo Biennale, 1967 literature Berman, Esmé. (1983) Art & Artist’s of South Africa, Cape Town: AA Balkema. Another example from this edition illustrated on page 403. notes The 1960s were a pivotal period in the biography of Sydney Kumalo, marking his passage from promising Johannesburg sculptor to nationally recognised artist with an international career. Influential promoters aided his career, notably Cecil Skotnes, who in 1960 favourably commented on his protégé’s work in a review published in Fontein , a short-lived art journal co-edited by poet Charles Eglington. Around this time Kumalo received a commission to produce a large outdoor sculpture for display in Milner Park, Johannesburg. While still tethered to a pious Christian theme, Kumalo’s St Francis (1961), a smooth-surfaced bronze portraying the founder of the Franciscan order, nonetheless crystallised his idiosyncratic style of figurative sculpture, which broadly synthesised the formal experiments of European modernism with the distorting and reductionist idioms of West and Central African sculpture. In 1962 Kumalo held his debut solo exhibition with dealer Egon Guenther, a noted local promoter of German Expressionism and collector of African traditional art. In 1963 Guenther further aided Kumalo’s early public reception by showing him under the Amadlozi banner with Giuseppe Cattaneo, Cecily Sash, Skotnes and Villa. Emboldened by the increasingly positive reception of his work, Kumalo resigned his teaching position at Polly Street in 1964 to pursue a full-time art career. Kumalo announced his mature style with Large Seated Woman (1964), a work noted for its expressive figuration and lacerated surface finishes. 1 This work forms part of a series depicting an elderly seated male figure. The wizened black elder is an enduring trope in South African art. Kumalo’s work is however more than the sum of its ostensibly clichéd parts or ‘primitivising influences’. 2 A precursor work, Madala I (1966), was awarded a bronze medal at the Transvaal Academy in 1967, the same year this particular iteration was shown on the Sao Paulo Biennale in Brazil. 1. Watter, Lola (1978) ‘Sydney Kumalo’, Our Art III , Pretoria: Lantern. Page 70. 2. Powell, Ivor (1995) ‘Us Blacks: Self-construction and the Politics of Modernism’, in Persons and Pictures , Johannesburg: Newtown Galleries. Page 15.