Strauss & co - 26 - 28 July 2020, Online

120 297 Peter Clarke SOUTH AFRICAN 1929–2014 Yuko, artist’s book signed and dated May 2004 collage and mixed media each page of book: 4 by 3,5 cm; box: 19 by 5 by 4 cm R20 000 – 30 000 298 Walter Battiss SOUTH AFRICAN 1906–1982 Nesos colophon signed, dated 1968 and inscribed ‘Athens’; each print signed 54 serigraphs bound as a book, with linen-wrapped boards 34,5 by 51 by 5 cm R250 000 – 350 000 PROVENANCE The Walter Battiss Estate. EXHIBITED Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg, Walter Battiss: I Invented Myself (The Jack M Ginsberg Collection) , 6 July to 9 October 2016. A de-bound copy of the book was exhibited. LITERATURE Warren Siebrits (ed.) (2016) Walter Battiss: I Invented Myself (The Jack M Ginsberg Collection) , Johannesburg: The Ampersand Foundation, another from the edition illustrated in colour on pages 87 to 93. Nesos (the Greek word for island) includes 54 screen-printed images and poems produced by Walter Battiss over eight months after five visits to the Greek islands between 1966 and 1968. According to Murray Schoonraad, Battiss ‘had been using silkscreen as art medium for some 15 years prior to this date but now he began to master the This work consists of a hand-made, unique, accordion-fold, paper-collage book in a hand-made ornamental box. The inscription on the book reads ‘This collage Yuko was made in May 2004, Ocean View, WC [Western Cape], South Africa’. Various types of paper have been used including pages from magazines. The Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC, has a very similar example in its collection, Bits and Pieces (2006), acquisition no. 2014-9-1. The Museum’s catalogue description notes that ‘Peter Clarke first tried his hand at collage in the 1950s after discovering the work of German artist Kurt Schwitters (1887–1922), who pioneered modern collage- making … Clarke is drawn to the improvisational nature of collage … [His] own affinity for recycling junk mail, advertisements, and packaging resonates with Schwitters’s proclivity to collect bits and pieces … [Clarke] mimics the interior decorating in South African squatter settlements where walls are papered over with pages from colourful magazines, commercial packaging, and other scraps of paper’. ©The Estate of Peter Clarke | DALRO 297 297 298 298 technique of a great artist. Because of his love for colour and kinetic forms, he was particularly attracted to this graphic medium… He rebelled against the machine age and, probably as a tribute to the unsophisticated life he encountered on the Greek islands, he decided to produce a handmade book … Even the text was hand cut and hand printed by Battiss. Many of the pages are technically experimental in order to obtain particular effects. The pages are evidence of a tremendous joie de vivre . They are gay and colourful, full of spontaneous use of colour and form. This is truly an ode to beauty – a poem in colour’. 1 Warren Siebrits, who organised the Battiss exhibition at the Wits Art Museum in 2016, is of the opinion that ‘there are no other silkscreens from the hundreds made by Battiss over the years that come close to the technical and visual sophistication of the exquisite images in Nesos , which are testament to the sheer pleasure the artist felt when visiting Greece’. 2 1. Murray Schoonraad (1976) Walter Battiss , Cape Town: Struik, page 20. 2. Warren Siebrits (2016) Walter Battiss: ‘I Invented Myself’ (The Jack M Ginsberg Collection), Johannesburg: The Ampersand Foundation, page 80. right : Another copy of the book Nesos, de-bound and displayed at the Wits Art Museum during the Walter Battiss: I Invented Myself (TheJack M Ginsberg Collection) exhibition, 2016.