Strauss & co - 13 November 2017, Johannesburg

188 262 Diamond Bozas SOUTH AFRICAN 1923– Still Life with Mealies, Bread, Onions signed; inscribed with the artist’s name, dated 1965, with the medium and the title on a Tatham Art Gallery label adhered to the reverse oil on board 160 by 72 cm R60 000 – 90 000 The work of Diamond Bozas is largely unknown outside KwaZulu- Natal. The artist grew up in Eshowe. After completing school he worked in the family bakery, using his holiday leave to study informally at the Durban Art School where he met and was mentored by Nils Andersen (1897–1972). He became a member of the Natal Society of Artists and, until very recently, maintained an active membership. In 1955 he was granted leave from the family business to study at the Chelsea School of Art, London. Fellow students included Elisabeth Frink (1930–1993), and Patrick Caulfield (1936–2005), with whom he maintained a life-long friendship. He graduated in 1959 with a National Diploma in Design. He had works accepted for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions of 1956, 1957 and 1958. Bozas returned to South Africa with his wife, Tasia, in 1959, and resumed working in the family business until the bakery closed in 1975. Bozas is a painter of still life, landscape and portraits. The foundations of his style, generally sparse and meticulously painted surfaces, were laid at the Chelsea School of Art. It is a style based in a general English modernist approach to painting developed from the beginning of the twentieth century, which accommodates a gentle abstraction of form based on accurate observation. It also pays homage to the social realism of John Bratby (1928–1992), founder of the Kitchen Sink School, in whose work Bozas and fellow students at Chelsea were particularly interested. However, Bozas remained grounded in tradition, influenced by his admiration of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699–1779), and Paul Cézanne (1859–1906). He was fascinated by Chardin’s placement of objects in simple arrangements on surfaces against sparse backgrounds. His fascination with Cézanne’s paintings was the manner in which forms and space were concertinaed to emphasise the two-dimensionality of surface whilst retaining a sense of three dimensional form. The underlying influence of both Chardin and Cézanne are evident in Still Life with Mealies, Bread, Onions (Lot 262), an ambitious painting entered and accepted for the Art South Africa Today show of 1965. It contains all the elements that would characterise the best of Diamond Bozas’still life paintings of future decades: a continued admiration of the choice of simple domestic items favoured by continued on page 189 A SELECTION OF ARTWORKS FROM KWAZULU-NATAL | LOTS 239–298