Strauss & co - 4 June 2018, Johannesburg

16 Abstract South African art can effectively be book-ended by the Overseas Exhibition of South African Art at the Tate Gallery in London in 1948, a veritable inventory of the local develop- ment of early modernism, and the State of the Art in South Africa conference at UCT in 1979, charting a perilous journey of the manner in which the arts could contribute to the demise of apartheid. South Africa was less isolated from the West in the immediate period after World War II (gaining official access to the Venice Biennale in 1952 and the Sao Paulo Biennale in 1957), and came into its own with such ventures as art magazines ( ArtCheck , ArtLook ), a flurry of new, avant garde galleries (for example, Goodman Gallery) and even its own art history (Esmé Berman’s Art and Artists of South Africa , 1970). Abstraction, the dominant artistic thrust in this era, encom- passes such diverse stylistic tenets as Abstract Expressionism, Action Painting, Informalism, Hard Edge, Geometric Abstrac- tion, and Colour Filed Painting. The dominance of abstraction is, however, complemented by, what Esmé Berman calls, ‘an interest in humanistic figural expressionism’, especially among Black artists, and notably that of the interest in ‘primitivism’ by the Amadlozi Group, spearheaded by Egon Guenther in 1963, a group that included such artists as Giuseppe Gattaneo, Cecily Sash, and Cecil Skotnes, and sculptors Sydney Kumalo and Edoardo Villa. These artists, although fiercely individualistic, all pursued in some way or another ‘the spirit of the African forefathers’. On the other hand, a more subjective look at hu- man relationships, given prominence by such artists as Kevin Atkinson, Nils Burwitz, Judith Mason and Helmut Starcke, by means of figural abstraction, provided a psychological dimen- sion to the mystical spirit of Africa. Abstract South African Ar t Lot 119 Sidney Goldblatt  Boats, Spain I ( detail)