Strauss & co - 11 November 2019, Johannesburg

107 SOUTH AFRICAN ARTISTS AND PARIS 99 Nel Erasmus SOUTH AFRICAN 1928– Exit from the Stage signed; signed with the artist’s initials and dated 2019 mixed media on paper sheet size: 100 by 70 cm R60 000 – 90 000 ITEM NOTES The artist attended the Académie Ranson from 1952, studied under Gustave Singier at the École des Beaux-Arts. Exhibited at Galerie Bogroff, Salon des Réalities Nouvelle, and Galerie Creuze, Paris. 100 Thijs Nel SOUTH AFRICAN 1943– Bonjour! Mme Matisse signed and dated ‘96; inscribed with the title on the reverse mixed media on wood panel 94 by 74 cm R80 000 – 120 000 ITEM NOTES The artist spent five years in Paris from 1970 to 1975. My work has always been concerned with energy, motion and the flow of life – first subconsciously, later consciously. I have always painted, drawn and explored. I could not have done so without my years in France at the Académie Ranson in Paris, or without Professor Souriau at the Sorbonne, and fabulous colleagues and friends. I would also not have achieved my goals without reinventing cubism for myself first. Cubism had only gone halfway and dispensed with the object, leaving the old language of painting to replace the object in a now objectless world. Abstract art followed. Confusion about what to do with this new freedom also followed – and it still exists. I returned to the object with the intention of breaking it up. I dispersed the fragments into the formidable and static old background space, disrupting that plane and making it an active part of the image. I started combining object and background space in a mutual exchange. Shakespeare summarised our very busy lives as entrances and exits from the stage of life. In Exit from the Stage there is an interplay between background, foreground and body fragments. The lines of the dancer’s body have been broken open, her surroundings no longer pressure her body, she no longer has to push against it. She has become part of it and it part of her. She is free. Nel Erasmus Two of the portraits that French artist Henri Matisse painted of his wife Amélie are in striking contrast to each other – the brightly coloured Fauvist work with a green stripe down the centre of the sitter’s face (1905), probably one of Matisse’s most well-known images, and the later portrait where the colours are relatively subdued and the face is a ghoulish grey mask with empty black eyes (1913). Thijs Nel chose the second of these for his own reinterpretation of Madame Matisse in the present lot. Although the basic composition and colour palette follow Matisse’s original, Nel has fractured the picture surface with angular planes that physically jut out into the viewer’s space, recalling the synthetic cubism of Picasso and Braque that was the dominant avant-garde style in Paris at the time Matisse painted his portrait. Nel has always had a particular affinity for Matisse and his work, possibly because, as a child, he noticed that his own given name, Mathijs, was similar to the painter’s surname. He recalls: ‘When I started my creative endeavours, he became to me a guiding light, a mentor. It is said that good teaching is caught, not taught and somehow the spirit of Matisse, more than any other of the countless great artists, resonated within me. In 1989 during a period working in Paris, I visited an exhibition of drawings from the family’s private collection at the Musée Matisse at Le Cateau-Cambrésis. They had never been exhibited before and I was entirely overcome with emotion at seeing Matisse’s work in the museum he himself had established. The present lot, Bonjour! Mme Matisse, was done some years later back in South Africa but is still, I hope, infused with a sense of Matisse and his work in Paris in the early twentieth century.’ 99 100