Strauss & co - 16 October 2017, Cape Town

278 590 Alexis Preller SOUTH AFRICAN 1911-1975 Homage to Hieronymus Bosch signed and dated ‘48 oil on canvas 40 by 50cm R   –    PROVENANCE Acquired from the artist by the current owner’s grandfather. LITERATURE cf. Esmé Berman and Karel Nel. (2009) Alexis Preller: Africa, the Sun and Shadows , Johannesburg: Shelf Publishing. A similar example is illustrated in colour on page 135. cf. Esmé Berman and Karel Nel. (2009) Alexis Preller: Collected Images , Johannesburg: Shelf Publishing. A similar example is illustrated in colour on pages 83 and 153. The 1948 date of this unusual still life composition, Homage to Hieronymus Bosch , is significant. It followed a period of acute anguish in Alexis Preller’s own life and was completed after his return from a recuperative trip to Paris where he had acquired a much-prized book on the works of Hieronymus Bosch. It was a feature of Preller’s temperament that personal traumas did not surface immediately in his work: only after a period of time and degree of metaphysical transformation would the emotional experience find expression in his painting. In this case it took the form of a dialogue between details from Bosch’s elegantly explicit catalogue of mental and spiritual torments in Triptych of the Temptations of St Anthony (circa 1505) and Preller’s predilection for creating symbolic still lives. This work was painted in the same year as Preller’s famous and unsettling Still Life with Eggs (1948), which also directly quotes Bosch’s work with figures painfully strung on a harp and others scrambling to stay upon a lyre, all set in a phantasmagorical context. In the work on offer, this same fantastic quality and the strange conjunction between still life and allegorical figure painting create a heightened dreamlike strangeness that connects Preller’s work obliquely to both the Italian metaphysical painters and to the Surrealist tradition.