Strauss & co - 13 November 2017, Johannesburg

256 328 Gerard Sekoto SOUTH AFRICAN 1913–1993 The Pink Road executed circa 1940–42 signed; inscribed with the artist’s name and title on the reverse oil on canvas 19,5 by 25 cm R1 000 000 – 1 500 000 EXHIBITED Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg, Gerard Sekoto: Unsevered Ties , 1 November 1989 – 10 February 1990, catalogue number 22. LITERATURE Lesley Spiro (ed.) (1989). Gerard Sekoto: Unsevered Ties , Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art Gallery. Illustrated in colour on page 32. notably ‘the graphic treatment of the landscape, the oil-slick-like shadows, and the solid, three-dimensional drapery’. 3 The painting also reveals how Sekoto looked and positioned himself relative to his subjects. Sekoto’s biographer N Chabani Manganyi writes that the artist possessed a ‘precocious inquisitiveness and wonder’. 4 This is certainly clear here. Sekoto was an unobtrusive observer, adept at standing to one side and – like a documentary photographer – recording the way people commuted, dressed, mingled, toiled and laughed, without judgement. Oftentimes his subjects don’t seem to even register his presence. The Pink Road (Lot 328) is an earlier example of Sekoto’s understated way of witnessing. The work was painted during Sekoto’s Sophiatown period (1939–42), when he became associated with Johannesburg art dealer Joan Ginsberg of the Gainsborough Galleries, found admiring patrons for his work, and also became acquainted with contemporaries like Alexis Preller and Walter Battiss. The work was exhibited at the Grand Hotel in Salisbury, Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe), in July 1943 on an exhibition of paintings by Maud Sumner, together with English and South African artists selected by the Gainsborough Galleries. Spiro notes that Sekoto’s contribution to the exhibition was singled out for attention in four contemporary newspaper reports. Although attention waned after his move to Paris, Sekoto is now celebrated as a pioneering modernist painter and participant in the formation of a progressive and authentic canon of South African painting. 1 N. Chabani Manganyi, Gerard Sekoto: ‘I am an African’, Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2004, page 43. 2 Lesley Spiro, Gerard Sekoto: Unsevered Ties, Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art, 1989, page 41. 3 Ibid ., page 39. 4 Manganyi, op.cit., page 45. continued from page 254