Strauss & co - 20 May 2019, Johannesburg

14 1 Erich Mayer SOUTH AFRICAN 1876–1960 Self Portrait as Student signed with the artist’s initials and dated 09; inscribed with the title on the reverse oil on canvas laid down on board 39,5 by 32,5 cm R20 000 – 30 000 PROVENANCE Estate Late Erich Mayer. 2 Erich Mayer SOUTH AFRICAN 1876–1960 Chessboard inscribed with ‘Fancy Chess Board containing 32 St Helena Views, most from original sketches by a Prisoner of War. Sketched and executed during a 3 weeks parol (sic), by Erich Mayer, Vrede (Orange Free State) in Oktober 1900’. ink on paper 56 by 56 cm R20 000 – 30 000 PROVENANCE Estate Late Erich Mayer. The Estate of the Late Erich Mayer (1876–1960) Having trained as an architect in Berlin, Germany, Erich Mayer came to South Africa in 1898 and found a job as a land surveyor in the Free State. This occupation facilitated his lifelong love of travelling the countryside. He joined the Boer commandoes during the South African War (1899–1902) and was captured and sent to St Helena as a Prisoner of War. Mayer sketched the environment on the island and the daily lives of the prisoners. The wonderfully detailed chess board that Mayer made is included in this sale (Lot 2). The black squares on the board are small sketches of prominent buildings on the island, including the house in which Napoleon Bonaparte spent his last days. Mayer’s wartime sketches are collected in Op St Helena: Vol van Hartepyn (2000) by Celestine Pretorius. After brief sojourns in Tunis (1904) and South West Africa (Namibia), Mayer returned to South Africa, to Pretoria. In 1911, he befriended JH (Henk) Pierneef, and the two artists often travelled out into the countryside together to paint, sometimes erecting their easels facing the same scene, as the two landscapes, one by each artist, in the estate attest (Lots 11 and 13). Pierneef was an expert printmaker and taught Mayer the art of woodcut printing. The estate includes a couple of fine linocut prints given by Pierneef to Mayer at the time (Lots 3, 4 and 5). On Mayer’s journey through the then Northern Transvaal (Limpopo) in 1911, he became acquainted with the famous Afrikaans writer and philosopher, Eugene Marais, who was staying at Rietfontein, the Van Rooyen family farm in the Waterberg. He gave Marais a self-portrait in pencil, the only known image of the artist apart from the wonderful self-portrait in oil that forms part of the estate (Lot1). Mayer sketched Ou Hendrick, the dignified itinerant storyteller who regaled the Rietfonteiners with his tales, many of which subsequently made their way into Marais’book, Dwaalstories . Mayer married Marga Gutter in 1928 and the two started a weaving school in Pretoria in 1933. Marga used many of Mayer’s designs, mostly those based on Bushman rock art motifs, in her woven cushion covers, one of which survives in the estate. Mayer was deeply interested in the art of the indigenous peoples of southern Africa, especially San rock art, an interest he shared with his friend Pierneef, and later a very young Walter Battiss. Mayer’s interest in San rock art started as early as 1898, when he made tracings of the Stow drawings he saw in the possession of a distant relative, Dorothea Bleek, in Cape Town (Lot 8). It was Mayer who first took Battiss to see rock paintings in situ, but Battiss’ identification with the art was more intense and spiritual than Mayer’s and undoubtedly contributed in greater measure to the development of his own art. Less known among Mayer’s artistic output are the large- scale commissioned works – the two murals in the Jeppe Street Post Office, Johannesburg (see Lot 6 for the preparatory sketches), and the one in the dining room of Monument High School, Krugersdorp (see Lot 7 for a sketch for this mural). Mayer can rightly be described as a heroic narrator, using a popular representative style to capture the lives of ordinary rural South African people and their environments on canvas.

RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NzIyMzE=