Strauss & co - 2014 Review

PIERNEEF Jacob Hendrik 1886-1957 An Extensive View of Farmlands signed and dated 1926 oil on canvas 90 by 120cm Sold R11 936 400, 10 November 2014 RECORD FOR THE ARTIST Returning to Pretoria from an extended sojourn in Europe in 1925, Jacob Hendrik Pierneef was inspired, as his biographers have recorded, to almost feverish intensity by a series of close encounters at the cutting edge of post- Impressionist modernism, and, addressing himself again to the African landscape, his art was transformed, coming swiftly into the mature articulation of his personalised style. It is in part because it dramatises so electrically the encounter of Pierneef’s newly won post Impressionist sensibility with the African landscape that was his lifelong subject that his soberly titled An Extensive View of Farmlands shattered all records for the artist, realising R11 936 400 in a Strauss & Co auction in November of 2014. There is much that is immediately striking about the work as compared with Pierneef’s production before his travels in Europe, notably a freedom and assertiveness of brush mark, a new usage in Pierneef that owes something in its bold insistence on the materiality of the medium of oil to the example of artists like Paul Cezanne and Vincent van Gogh. Whereas in Pierneef’s earlier output, brush mark was largely suppressed, it now comes to have a life of its own and indeed comes to serve, in the particular painting, as the basic building block from which the picture is constructed, and through which its interrelationships are explored and its energies developed. Crucially what is here to be observed is a shift away from an art concerned with the appearance of things to one concerned to find order and structure in what is seen and represented. Notably, while there is in the foreground a relatively consistent light source, (suggested in “shadow” planes of darker hue, not however tending to black) this effect is not carried through into the deeper space where the light appears to be generated from within rather than 34