Strauss & co - 15 October 2018, Cape Town

307 In 1970, writing in the catalogue for his survey exhibition at the University of Stellenbosch, Erik Laubscher organised his paintings into five developmental phases. Tellingly, three of them dealt with his treatment of landscape. Laubscher was especially intrigued by the pastoral landscapes of the Swartland, enough to list these paintings as a distinct category in his earlier development. Painted when the artist was in his mid-60s, this present lot depicts the tilled landscapes of the so-called “Land of Waveren” in the Tulbagh region of the Bree River Valley, adjacent to the Swartland. The Waveren name is derived from a prominent Amsterdam family related to Governor Willem van der Stel’s mother and often features in early historical accounts of the Cape. Unlike his earlier geometric landscapes from the 1960s, the artist’s later work reflected a more naturalistic approach. Flatness, a key value of Clement Greenberg’s theory of abstraction and a defining feature of Laubscher’s early landscapes, is set aside in favour of perspective. The pregnant clouds, tilled landscapes and vanishing road cumulatively direct the eye to a point far on the horizon that is also at the centre of the painting. Laubscher did not wholly forsake his French modernist education in his later career. His fragmented landscape and the overall “monumental approach” 1 adopted in this composition integrate lessons that Laubscher picked up from his Paris master, Cubist painter Fernand Léger. – Sean O’Toole 1. Muller Ballot (1994). Erik Laubscher , University of Stellenbosch, Stellenbosch, page 7. 589