Strauss & co - 6 March 2017, Cape Town

268 536 Cecil SKOTNES SOUTH AFRICAN 1926–2009 Still Life with Coffee Pot and Fruit signed carved, painted and incised wood panel, in the artist’s handmade frame 127 by 127 cm, including frame R  –   ©The Estate of Cecil Skotnes | DALRO Cecil Skotnes studied painting at the University of the Witwatersrand, where the still life genre formed an essential component of the newly founded art school’s parochial curriculum.1 In 1977 he produced The Origin of Wine , a three-panel scene for the Cape Wine Growers Association (KWV) that includes a still life with fruit, fish, bottles and glasses in the left panel. “The triptych unashamedly divulges the artist’s epicurean gastronomic pleasures,”noted Frieda Harmsen.2 Skotnes credited art collector and dealer Vittorio Meneghelli with introducing him to the pleasures of food and wine. He amassed a wine collection of 1800 bottles at his home in Observatory, Johannesburg. Skotnes returned to painting after his move to Cape Town in 1979. He painted a number of still life scenes. The present lot shares notable similarities with Still Life with Fruit, Olives, Wine Bottle and Coffee Pot , a work gifted by the artist to a chef and sold for R909 440 at a Strauss & Co auction in 2013. Both works offer table settings viewed from extreme vertical perspectives. Any sense of naturalism is disrupted by the flattened picture plane and the painter’s classificatory arrangement of food and objects, which are interchangeably portrayed in side and top profile.