Strauss & co - 2014 Review

PIERNEEF Jacob Hendrik 1886-1957 fromwithout. What we are confronted with then, in short, is a dialogue between the artist and the landscape, not any more the landscape as filtered through the conventions of representation. It is the palpability of the philosophical dimension that makes An Extensive View of Farmlands so poignant and so important a work within Pierneef’s oeuvre; that positions it so powerfully on the cusp of his apprenticeship and his maturity as an artist and at the same time engages Pierneef’s pre-eminent position within the discourses of South African art. This ongoing and animating dialogue between the self of the artist and the matter of his representation is equally present though in a different register in another of Pierneef’s works which, at R1 818 880, achieved a significant result at auction by Strauss & Co in June this year. Titled Lowveld in Summer and signed in 1946, the work essays a classic theme within the artist’s oeuvre – Mimosa trees washed in the distinctively African light of which Pierneef was a master, and set against an African sky. In a usage that can be seen also in the foreground of An Extensive View of Farmlands , Pierneef’s mimosas, while observationally convincing are also infused with a memory of the stylisations of art nouveau in their traceries. Equally however, the energies they generate are almost animist in evoking natural forces and energies, while, remarkably, also finding echoes of the line in San cave paintings to which Pierneef powerfully deferred in his sense of the distinctively African style to which he, avowedly, aspired. In short the artist as human subject is inscribed at several levels into the rendering of the landscape and it is on the basis of such dynamics more than anything else that Pierneef’s claim to importance as an artist must be understood to rest. Though he is certainly not insensitive to the sheer and mystic presence of nature as given in the unfolding of nature, what Pierneef paints is not the landscape on its own terms but the agency of the human within it. Thus it is that in his compositions he is much concerned with near-geometric divisions of the painting surface, with finding the golden mean within the shapes and the positioning of landscape elements – with, in short, finding the architecture of nature within its chthonic energies. In some works like the Landscape with River of 1938, auctioned at R1 364 160, a minor cloud formation is used to underline the Arcadian qualities of a charmingly pastoral scene, finding formal echoes and serving to naturalise the artist’s observations in an almost pantheist tranquillity. In others, like a work from the same year, a Landscape with Acacias and Clouds , which came under the hammer for R886 704, cloud is played as a dramatic element, a burst of dynamic light within the boundaries of the frame, all but ecstatic in its intensity. Others again, like the 1953 Undulating Landscape with Distant Mountains (also auctioned for more than R1million in November) find sky in more ruminative mode, echoing the shapes picked up in the landscape and fitting them into a cosmic narrative of man and the spaces he inhabits. But what is common is an intimacy between the human and the natural and the search for what is a state of grace in which the two become one. That this has a powerfully ideological edge is undeniable; the meditation Pierneef engages is that of the “Boer” – or as the writer Max Du Preez is in the habit of designating himself, that of the “pale native” – and its text is concerned with belonging and a powerfully mystic relationship with the land. In the past this left Pierneef somewhat vulnerable to being lionised – then as the wheels of history turned, disparaged – as a painter of apartheid. But in fact he was no such thing, and indeed withdrew from his public life as an educator on precisely this basis: where the syllabus was seeking to promote a white identity and to naturalise a separatist white destiny in Africa, Pierneef’s vision was one in which a European inheritance would be fused with and indissoluble from the African context, in which San cave painting would inform consciousness as much as the golden mean or the innovations of a Cézanne. That such a vision still has the capacity to move us and resonate within our experience of life at the southern tip of Africa is given some measure in the fact that in the 21st Century the best of Pierneef stands at the centre of major collections of South African art and commands ever-rising prices at auction. And for that matter that is expressed in the ongoing pilgrimage of the contemporary painter Carl Becker to identify and to visit – with easel to hand – the landscapes painted by Pierneef, in search of that bondedness with the land. Ivor Powell 36