Strauss & co - 11 November 2019, Johannesburg

90 SOUTH AFRICAN ARTISTS AND PARIS 72 Alexis Preller SOUTH AFRICAN 1911–1975 Study for Centre Panel, All Africa Mural, Receiver of Revenue (SARS), Johannesburg signed and dated ‘54 oil on canvas 40 by 50 cm R400 000 – 600 000 LITERATURE Cf. Esmé Berman and Karel Nel (2009) Africa, the Sun and Shadows, Volume II: Collected Images. Pages 142 to 149. ITEM NOTES Although Preller hoped to study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumiére in Paris under Othon Friesz, he couldn’t afford to, but was introduced to Friesz by his artist-friend Judith Gluckman on a visit in 1937. He visited Paris again in 1946. Preller’s admiration for Raoul Dufy is evident in the present lot, an oil on canvas sketch for the upper part of the central panel of the large three-panel All Africa mural, installed at the former Receiver of Revenue offices, Johannesburg. The mural, by far Preller’s largest undertaking up to that point, was commissioned in 1953. He worked on the many preliminary drawings and paintings and the final panels for two years, completing and installing the work in 1955. In the finished central panel, the upper part depicts ‘The Triumph of the African Sun’and the lower part a frieze of warriors and musicians. In this sketch painting, the frieze is absent and the strange disk (which seems to derive from a similar form in Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights ), with its merry-go-round of paired horses is being developed. All the elements of the final design are sketched out loosely as the forms and spatial arrangements are being thought through. Preller describes how in the final mural ‘over the floating disc there is a large mask shape, a purely African representation, with horns, which I wanted to symbolize the sun over the continent’. Here, the gold, black and scarlet sun is left underdeveloped, and Preller seems to change tack later in the final version when the sun recognisably becomes a Bateke (Congo) dancing mask. In drawing on Egyptian, Etruscan, early Netherlandish, early Renaissance and African sources, Preller creates ‘a new Africa, a mythic world, a construction of deep hybridity, that is regal, beautiful and fantastical’. 1 1. Esmé Berman and Karel Nel (2009) Africa, the Sun and Shadows, Volume II, Collected Images , Johannesburg: Shelf Publishing, page 148.