Strauss & co - 5 June 2017, Johannesburg

182 229 Jacob Hendrik Pierneef SOUTH AFRICAN 1886–1957 Farm Jonkershoek with Twin Peaks Beyond, Stellenbosch signed and dated 1928; inscribed with a dedication in another hand on the reverse oil on canvas 73,5 by 100,5 cm R6 000 000 – 8 000 000 PROVENANCE Acquired by Professor A.E. du Toit, the first professor of Mathematics at the University of Pretoria, and the University’s Vice-Chancellor and Principal between 1927 and 1934; thence by descent. Dedication reads: ‘To dear Susan, with much love from mama, Anne du Toit’ As a major, magnificent example by Henk Pierneef, Farm Jonkershoek with Twin Peaks Beyond, Stellenbosch , is at once instantly recognisable and breathtakingly unique. Painted in 1928, at the beginning of what Esmé Berman and PG Nel have long described as the artist’s most celebrated period of ‘discovery and mastery’, the picture not only offers a beautiful, iconic view, but is also Pierneef’s stunning precursor to his famous Stellenbosch panel that was installed in the Johannesburg Railway Station in November 1932 (fig.1). No comparison between the two versions has been possible until now as the present lot has always remained in private hands, and has never been exhibited or illustrated. Although Pierneef and his family had settled briefly in Hilversum and Rotterdam during the Anglo-Boer War, the artist made his first professional trip to Europe in July 1925. With his wife May he visited London, Rotterdam, Dusseldorf, Munich, Berlin, Paris, Antwerp and Bruges, and was endlessly struck by the various guises of modernism he encountered, as well as the lingering aesthetic of Art Nouveau. In Amsterdam he met Anton Hendriks (who would later become the director of the Johannesburg Art Gallery) and Willem van Konijnenburg, whose art theories, based in the main on severe geometric principles and harmonious proportion, made an immediate impact on him. Back home, energised by his European experiences, and armed with a hoard of catalogues and books on Impressionism, Neo-Impressionism, Symbolism and Art Nouveau, Pierneef felt ready to adjust his style, assimilate his new influences, ‘deliver a heavy blow on the Pretoria frontier’, and to ‘shock many an art connoisseur’. 1 In this vein, he revealed some of his early, gently modern experiments with mixed success at small shows at the Levson Gallery and Girls’High School in Pretoria in 1926, and at Lezard’s in Johannesburg in 1927. While some critics encouraged his new-found avant- garde spirit, buyers were more cautious. A much larger exhibition the following year in Polliack’s Music Shop in Pretoria, however, which featured a good number of deliberately reduced, markedly geometric compositions with Symbolist undercurrents, while generating much debate, proved a financial disaster. Works such as Study in Blue and Komposisie – Geometriese Landskap (fig.2), now deservingly iconic, were widely panned, and the artist was persuaded to turn back towards his more familiar, monumental style. Farm Jonkershoek with Twin Peaks Beyond, Stellenbosch , executed in the same year as the Polliack show, is particularly special as it captures most spectacularly the moment of the artist’s stylistic transition. The mountainside splintered into shards of pure colour is an obvious link to his recent European exposure, while van Konijnenburg would have appreciated the linear clarity, architectonic structure and proportional discipline on show, but in depicting the simple vernacular homestead nestled amongst ordered gardens and enormous, watchful trees, Pierneef returned to a more characteristic and endearing mode. Fig 1. Stellenbosch panel. Fig 2. Geometriese Landskap. continued on page 184