Strauss & co - 10 November 2014, Johannesburg

121 164 Edoardo Daniele VILLA south african 1915–2011 Heraldic Figure signed and dated 1988 bronze with a grey patina; mounted on a steel base height: 45,5 cm, including base R40 000–60 000 notes This bronze formed part of a large selection of sculpture included on the two-man show ‘Villa Skotnes’at the Pretoria Art Museum in 1989. In the accompanying catalogue, museum director Albert Werth contextualised this modestly-scaled work against the broad sweep of Edoardo Villa’s prodigious post war output: ‘Early works had a barbed nervousness, the open shapes defined by lines and angles. Then came the works in which heavy volumes dominated, and later these volumes were defined by curved steel surfaces. Later again volumes were reduced dramatically to elongated cylinders.’ 1 In distinction to Villa’s large outdoor works, monumental figure totems and abstract geometrical forms, Werth remarked of Villa’s ‘compact’bronzes that they were ‘highly self-contained, with a powerful inner energy’. 2 The observation is worth analysing. Throughout his life Villa’s abstracted figures were repeatedly likened to Henry Moore, an impression no doubt amplified by the prominent placement of one of his works near a Moore bronze outside architect Monty Sack’s Schlesinger Centre (1967) in Braamfontein. Villa, jokingly perhaps, dismissed the likeness when, in the 1990s, he is reported to have asked for a book about Moore, ‘so I can see who this guy is that influenced me’. 3 Far less remarked upon in appraisals of the development and form of Villa’s abstract grammar is the artistic milieu of early post war Johannesburg, where Villa matured through representation to abstraction. In 1955 Villa moved into a house in Parktown North with Stanley Dorfman, a noted young painter who in 1950 exhibited with Christo Coetzee. Latterly recognised for his work as one of Britain’s leading pop music television producers, Dorfman also introduced Douglas Portway to Cornwall. When Portway emigrated to England in the late 1950s Villa bought his house in Kew, Johannesburg. These relationships and associations suggest other ways of approaching Villa’s intimate bronzes, which while couched in an international style modernism are also the expression of home-grown friendships, conversations, experiments and accomplishments. 1. Werth, Albert (1989) Villa Skotnes , Pretoria: Pretoria Art Museum. Page 2. 2. Ibid. Page 2. 3. Barron, Chris (2011), ‘Eduardo Villa: Famed sculptor’, in Sunday Times , 8 May.