Strauss & co - 2017 Boerneef

10 Prelude to a Dance belongs to the period of artworks created between 1955 and 1962, which includes African Rocks and Figures (in the collection of the South African National Gallery), Fishermen Drawing Nets (1955), African Women (1960) and African Paradise (1961). These paintings share the same stylistic devices and subject or themes. They show Battiss looking to Africa for inspiration and combining scenes from everyday rural village life, rites and rituals, the art of the Bushmen and that of the Ancient Egyptians. ln Prelude, Battiss creates his own elusive narrative. Much as the explicit meaning of the paintings of the Khoi-San artists now elude us, Battiss invites us into his imagined world to create our own narrative. The stylised figures become calligraphic symbols that hold whole phrases of meaning as opposed to a single letter within the Roman alphabet. During this period, Battiss was also examining Egyptian Hieroglyphics and Islamic calligraphy - that a word formed a symbolic picture of meaning. In terms of the conventions of hierarchical proportioning in Egyptian mural painting, the three female figures (centre mid-left) may be read as being of the greatest importance or significance. However, we may also read these as symbolic of contemporaneous reality overlaying the mythical past. These figures seem to be conversing with one another; one of the women holds a fruit, perhaps an apple, which then recalls the judgement of the Three Graces by Paris . Aside from the three large female figures rendered in black silhouettes and draped in brightly coloured and patterned wraps, all the other figures are depicted within the language of Khoi-San figurative stylisation. They are rendered in swift, calligraphic line-work, which is then filled in with flat tones of colour. Battiss sought to free colour from symbolic meaning: “To enjoy colour as colour not servile to tone or science dogma, thus beholding polychrome paintings as chords of colours unsullied by superstitious associations - yellow ochre to be enjoyed for its special yellowness, and white for its special whiteness, and black for its special blackness.”The figures reside on one plane while the background has been reduced to a flat one- dimensional decorative surface - a patchwork of colour upon which the figures appear in friezes. While these three central figures hold the greatest visual gravitas within the composition we are soon drawn to a figure on their right, that of an artist holding a palette and paintbrushes. One is tempted to guess that this is the figure of Battiss, the shaman or Wiseman-trickster. Beneath the paintbrush of the artist figure is a series of orange dots. In the lexicon of Bushman rock-art the most common interpretation of painted patterns and dots is seen to be evidence of the ocular stimulation that occurs in trance states. As a stylistic device within this painting, they lead the eye of the viewer from the artist to three dancing figures. These figures, their legs bent at the knees, direct the eye to the group of figures in the top right hand corner. The turquoise figure is holding a black object which leads the eye across the top of the canvas to the three figures at top centre, who in turn direct our attention to the Khoi-San hunter figure on the extreme left. Showering down from him are turquoise dots leading to the large group of ochre and orange figures in the bottom right-hand corner. In the bottom centre is a singular non-human figure, a white bird. Its form is strongly reminiscent of the national bird of Zimbabwe, based on the Soapstone carvings found at the Great Zimbabwe Ruins, of which Battiss would have been familiar with having travelled there. Beside the bird, two white figures lead the eye to the last group on the middle right, their up-stretched arms leading us into the top right hand group again. Like Matisse’s La Dance (1909) the arms and legs of the dancing figures lead the eyes around and around the swirling motion of the dancing figures. Here too Battiss leads the eye through the outstretched limbs from one set of figures or dancers to the next. When questioned as to why he was so drawn to the artwork of the Bushmen he replied: ”When thinking over and contemplating these traces of the past, we feel a deep sympathy with the soul of these men, reincarnating something of their thought in ourselves, and so, resuscitating in our minds part of their secret life.” As the artist-shaman he invites us to participate in this dance of life that we too may be lifted out of our reality into a trance - like or elevated state by either participating in the dance or allowing ourselves to be absorbed by the artwork. C. W. H. Source: SWELCO Auction Catalogue, Jonkershoek, Cape Town October 2010.