Strauss & co - 26 - 28 July 2020, Online

143 332 Clément Sénèque SOUTH AFRICAN 1896–1930 Mont Blanc signed and dated 24 oil on canvas 81 by 99 cm R80 000 – 120 000 Clément Sénèque went to Paris in 1921 to continue his architectural studies, first begun in Durban, and his training and experience in this field translate visibly into his art. His view of the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris (Lot 333) brings to mind the series of works painted by Claude Monet in the 1890s of a similar Gothic edifice, the façade of Rouen Cathedral. But whereas Monet’s works are all about light, colour and atmosphere and how they change moment by moment, Sénèque’s focus is volume and mass. Whether it was the Parisian urban landscape or the massive, craggy bulk of the French Alps (Lot 332) where the artist and his new wife Marie-Thérèse honeymooned 1923, Sénèque showed the same interest in building the picture plane using a reduced palette of greys, browns, blue and white. His sober approach reflected the ‘return to order’that prevailed in the arts in Europe in the 1920s and the turning away from the disruptive and experimental styles that had characterised the decade leading up to WWI. As Brendan Bell notes, it is ‘the interest in the underlying architectonic forms of nature and man- made objects and the extraction of these essential forms for the purpose of pictorial structure which sets Sénèque’s art apart from the French Impressionsists’ 1 and the other styles that preceded him. 1. Brendan Bell (1988) Clément Sénèque: Life and Work , unpublished MA dissertation, University of Pietermaritzburg, page 2. 333 Clément Sénèque SOUTH AFRICAN 1896–1930 The Cathedral of Notre Dame, Paris signed and dated 21 oil on canvas 59,5 by 49 cm R50 000 – 70 000