Strauss & co - 9 November 2015, Johannesburg

174 248 Cecily SASH south african 1924 – Target Composition I printed with the artist’s name and title on a label adhered to the reverse oil on canvas 122,5 by 183,5 cm R80 000 – 120 000 exhibited Pretoria Art Museum, Pretoria, Cecily Sash Retrospective 1954-1974 , 1974, catalogue number 91, illustrated in colour in the catalogue centrefold Greatly admired as a pioneering artist and teacher, Delmas-born Cecily Sash was trained by Maurice van Essche in Johannesburg and Victor Passmore in London. A founding member of art dealer Egon Guenther’s Amadlozi Group of artists, in 1965 she spent a year studying art education in Britain and the United States, notably interviewing abstract painter and teacher Josef Albers. 1 On her return to Johannesburg, where she taught design at the University of the Witwatersrand, Sash became a committed proponent of hard-edged abstraction in painting. In a 1968 interview with Robert Hodgins, Sash rationalised her internationalism as follows: ‘What we must be careful of is not to be afraid of our borrowings. I think myself that there is a sort of over-anxious desire for national art in this country.’ 2 Sash’s commitment to pure abstraction was however short-lived. In the early 1970s, she returned to figurative subjects, notably the bird. An enduring motif in her work, Sash began depicting birds in 1955 after a dove flew into the art room where she gave classes at Jeppe Girls’ High. 3 This work forms part of a series known as Bird and Target (1973–74). Sash here integrates the vibrant palette and linear styling of her earlier hard-edged abstractions into a self-described ‘metaphysical’ painting that visualises her personal crisis – she emigrated to England in 1974 due to this country’s segregationist politics. ‘The target was on the bird originally as a decorative device which derived from my tapestry designs in 1973,’ explained Sash, adding that here it however served as ‘a symbol of destruction’. 4 Esmé Berman has remarked on the dual role of the avian symbols in this body of work: ‘concurrently victims and aggressors, their weapons are their vicious claws and beaks, but their wings have been replaced by brightly coloured targets’. 5 Sash recognised this ambiguity: she has described her target-festooned birds as both ‘monumental and vulnerable.’ 6 1. Sash interviewed Albers in December 1965, transcript in the archives of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. 2. Robert Hodgins, ‘South African Art: Has it Made it?’, News/Check, 20 December 1968, page 16 3. Harmsen, Frieda. (1985) Looking at South African Art , Pretoria: JL van Schaik. Page 33 4. Sash, Cecily. (1999) Working Years , Presteigne: Studio Sash. Page 44 5. Berman, Esmé. (1999) Painting in South Africa , Johannesburg: Southern Book Publishers. Page 272. 6. Sash, op.cit., page 45