Strauss & co - 11 November 2019, Johannesburg

71 South African Artists and Paris Paris has been a beacon to successive generations of South African artists. The list of artists who lived and worked in the French capital, often briefly, but just as often for extended periods, is extensive. Artworks from some of them are gathered in this sale. The transformative effect of these detours, layovers and protracted sojourns was acknowledged in an important 1988 exhibition held at the South African National Gallery, Cape Town. The outcome of more than two years of research by three staff members, Paris and South African Artists, 1850–1965, explored the early influence of Paris and French aesthetic innovations on South Africa and its isolated artistic community. For collectors, the companion catalogue remains a valuable resource, especially for its listing of South African artists with significant links to Paris. The first South African artist to study in Paris was Robert Gwelo Goodman, whose digs was a small room with charcoal heater. The influence of belle-époque Paris on the formation of a South African tradition is clear in Edward Roworth’s early writings for the avant-garde literary journal Voorslag . Notwithstanding the ravages of two wars, the City of Lights continued to exert a strong hold on the South African imagination after 1945. Erik Laubscher left London in 1950 to study in Paris, at the Académie Montmartre, where Fernand Léger was the school’s best-known faculty member. Influences necessarily varied. Cecil Higgs, Bettie Cilliers-Barnard, Sydney Goldblatt and Anna Vorster all studied at the Paris art school founded by cubist painter André Lhote. The rich discourse around painterly abstraction that emerged after World War II energised the work of expatriate artists resident in Paris, notably Christo Coetzee, Paul du Toit and Nel Erasmus. Coetzee lived in Paris for ten years, showing with Lucio Fontana at Galerie Stadler in 1959 – incidentally the same year that South African poet Sinclair Beiles performed in a now-legendary levitation act organised by Greek artist Takis at Parisian dealer Iris Clert. Post-war Paris was more than simply a platform for showcasing innovative work; throughout its modern history the city has provided shelter for dissidents and exiles. Following in the footsteps of pioneering abstract painter Ernest Mancoba, who settled in Paris in 1938, Gerard Sekoto and Breyten Breytenbach also made Paris their home. For many South African artists, though, Paris was a far-off ideal absorbed second- hand through exhibition catalogues, art magazines or the scattering of French works in local collections, notably the Johannesburg Art Gallery, or through influential teachers who had studied in the city, such as Laubscher or Ruth Prowse. The early work of Walter Battiss, who visited Paris in 1938 on his first trip abroad, copying works by Gauguin, is partly a story of synthesising the influence of a distant tradition with his knowledge of home-grown practices. The influence of Paris is evident in the work of contemporary masters like William Kentridge and Penny Siopis. In 1981 Kentridge studied mime and theatre at a school founded by Jacques Lecoq. Five years later, Siopis undertook a seven-month residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts – one of many local artists to do so, among them Moshekwa Langa and Billie Zangewa – after winning the Volkskas Atelier Award with her painting Melancholia (of which lot 64 is a companion piece). In 1989 Esther Mahlangu was the only South African invited to show on curator Jean-Hubert Martin’s landmark exhibition Magiciens de la Terre (Magicians of the Earth, 1989). Still debated, this exhibition nonetheless underscored a firm truism: Paris is an important staging post for bold and innovative art. Irma Stern was a frequent exhibitor in the late 1920s and early 1930s. More recently, photographers David Goldblatt and Santu Mofokeng were heralded with large survey shows, respectively at the Centre Pompidou (2018) and Jeu de Paume (2011). In 2018, sculptor Bronwyn Katz held a well- received solo show at Palais de Tokyo; Kendell Geers cemented his international status with a solo show at this contemporary art museum in 2002. The corrupting influence of Paris is not without its critics. Roworth scorned the formal innovation coming out of Paris in his later years. In 1984, Robert Hodgins marvelled at how the ‘old idolatry of Paris’had shut off artists to other influences, notably the expressionism of Weimar Germany. The blockbuster 2006 exhibition, Picasso and Africa , proposed as ‘dialogue between Picasso and the African continent,’ not only prompted lengthy queues in Johannesburg and Cape Town, it also revived ‘the unfinished debate about African art and western modernism,’to quote art historian Chika Okeke-Agulu. Paris nonetheless endures, and its influence continues to resonate in the work of many South African artists. Sources: Lucy Alexander, Emma Bedford, Evelyn Cohen (1988) Paris and South African Artists, 1850–1965 , Cape Town: South African National Gallery. Ivor Powell (1984) ‘One of my own fragments: An interview with Robert Hodgins’, De Arte , No. 31, pages 36–45. Joyce Newton Thompson (1951) Gwelo Goodman , Cape Town: Howard Timmins. Sylvie Ramond (2012) 20th Century Masters: The Human Figure , Johannesburg: Standard Bank Gallery.