Strauss & co - 7 October 2019, Cape Town

237 646 Walter Battiss SOUTH AFRICAN 1906-1982 Group Scene signed oil on canvas 61 by 77cm R350 000 - 500 000 line nonetheless remained important. The rudimentary figures drawn into the wet paint are typical of Battiss’s sgraffito method of creating descriptive detail. This decorative method is closely associated with fresco painting and pottery, but also shares formal affinities with the techniques used by the rock engravers Battiss so admired. Commenting on the masterpieces of “impressionist”engraving he saw in the field, Battiss wrote: “The engravers here depend more on feeling than on science and they suggest modelling rather than depict it.” 2 The same can be said of these lots. Details are generically rather than specifically rendered. It is the wholeness of the impression that counts. 1. Walter Battiss (1945). Wall text (WBC/08/010, 1945) at exhibition The Origins of Walter Battiss: “Another Curious Palimpsest”, Origins Centre, Johannesburg, 2016. 2. Walter Battiss (1948). The Artists of the Rocks , Red Faun Press, Pretoria, page 31. PROVENANCE Bonhams, London, 24 March 2010, lot 90.