Strauss & co - 10 - 11 May 2020, Cape Town

241 626 Erik Laubscher SOUTH AFRICAN 1927-2013 Still Life with Fruit and a Blue Jug signed and dated 52 oil on canvas 54,5 by 54,5cm R500 000 - 700 000 PROVENANCE Wolpe Gallery, Cape Town. Private Collection. Eric Laubscher’s early career is a catalogue of still lifes. His compositions from this period are characterised by their graphic delineation of forms, flattened picture planes and bold use of colour. The formal styling of his paintings owed a debt of influence to Fernand Léger, Laubscher’s teacher at the Académie Montmartre in Paris, as well as Bernard Buffet, a leading figure in the New Realist school of French expressionism. From Buffet he gained insights into how to choreograph pictorial space and notate essentials. Produced in 1952, the year he returned to Cape Town, this lot registers Buffet’s waning influence on Laubscher, who already in Paris had begun incorporating bolder colour treatments into his still-life compositions. Laubscher’s contemporary style of painting made an immediate impact when he first exhibited in Cape Town. Writing in 1952, Walter Battiss described his work as “compelling”, adding that Laubscher’s ability to “paint big canvases with satisfying assurance” represented “a challenge to stale ideas in the Cape”. 1 Matthys Bokhorst, who later became director of the South African National Gallery, commended Laubscher’s still lifes for their “stylised realism with strong cubistic elements”. 2 1. Walter Battiss (1952)“New Art and Old Art in South Africa”, The Studio , Vol. 144, page 70. 2. Matthys Bokhorst (1955)“Exhibition by Erik Laubscher”, Cape Times , 24 September.