Strauss & co - 2017 Boerneef

The art of the 1950s to the 1970s can effectively be book-ended by the Overseas Exhibition of South African Art at the Tate Gallery in London in 1948, a veritable inventory of the local development of early modernism, and the State of the Art in South Africa conference at UCT in 1979, charting a perilous journey of the manner in which the arts could contribute to the demise of apartheid. South Africa was less isolated from the West in the immediate period after World War II gaining official access to the Venice Biennale in 1950, with a seminal work by Walter Battiss, “African in the Autumn, the Long Yellow Grass”, among others, on display in the present exhibition. A second work by Walter Battiss currently on display, “Prelude to the Dance”, was exhibited at the Sao Paulo Biennale in 1960. Edoardo Villa received an award at the Sao Paulo Biennale in 1957 and South African art came into its own with ventures such as art magazines ( ArtCheck, ArtLook ), a flurry of new, avant garde galleries (for example, Goodman Gallery) and even an own art history (Esmé Berman’s Art and Artists of South Africa , 1970). Abstraction, the dominant artistic thrust in this era, encompasses such diverse stylistic tenets as Abstract Expressionism, Action Painting, Informalism, Hard Edge, Geometric Abstraction and Colour Filled Painting. Excellent examples of these different forms of abstraction from the Frank and Lizelle Kilbourn and Pieter G. Colyn collections are included in a special exhibition at Welgemeend during August 2017, which is catalogued in this publication. The paintings on display focus on non-figurative abstraction whereas the sculptures are more focused on figurative abstraction. The dominance of non-figurative abstraction was, however, complemented by, what Esmé Berman calls, ‘’an interest in humanistic figural expressionism’’, especially among Black artists. This was evidenced by the interest in ‘’primitivism’’ of the Amadlozi Group, spearheaded by Egon Guenther in 1963, a group that included such artists as Giuseppe Cattaneo, Cecily Sash, and Cecil Skotnes, and sculptors Sydney Kumalo and Edoardo Villa. These artists, although fiercely individualistic, all pursued in some way or another ‘’the spirit of the African forefathers’’. On the other hand, a more subjective look at human relationships, were given prominence by artists such as Kevin Atkinson, Nils Burwitz, Judith Mason and Helmut Starcke, by means of figural abstraction, providing a psychological dimension to the mystical spirit of Africa. The combination of an emphasis on formalism/ abstraction and the interest in the human condition, inevitably led to the development of a social consciousness in the late-1970s when the South African art world had to articulate its political position in a troubled country. Essentially, the major forces that shaped the art of the early 50s include the Wits Group (Christo Coetzee, Nel Erasmus, Larry Scully, Cecil Skotnes, Gordon Vorster, and art historian, Esmé Berman); the influx of immigrant artists (Armando Baldinelli, Guiseppe Cattaneo, Pranas Domsaitis, John Dronsfield, Alfred Krenz, Maurice van Essche, Edoardo Villa, Jean Welz); returnee South African artists from Europe and the United Kingdom (Erik Laubscher, Bettie Cilliers-Barnard, Sydney Goldblatt, Georgina Ormiston, Douglas Portway); Abstraction: South African Art from the 50s to the 70s and such South African outliers in exile as Ernest Mancoba in Copenhagen, joining the CoBrA group, and Gerard Sekoto in Paris. In addition, movements such as Op Art (Cecily Sash and the revolution in art education at Wits she brought about in the late-1960s), and Conceptualism (under the auspices of the young Willem Boshoff at Wits Tech, together with Michael Goldberg, Wopko Jensma and Claude van Lingen) formed part of this era. The 70s unfortunately saw a renewed isolation from the West through a series of cultural boycotts of South African arts, and the rise of protest/resistance art (Norman Catherine, Dumile Feni, Gavin Jantjes, Paul Stopforth, Gavin Younge). It did, however, not diminish the internal dynamism of local art which explored other forms of expression, such as the use of photograph as means of artistic expression, a notion rigorously debated at the Michaelis Art School at UCT; the first performance piece in South Africa, Crying Earth , staged by Shelley Sacks in Thibault Square, Cape Town in 1975; and the criticism that accompanied the belated visit by Clement Greenberg, high-priest of formalism in the same year, purportedly to endorse the local versions of abstraction. Abstraction in the art of the 50s to the 70s, then, is best described by Hayden Proud when he called this period, a ‘’random collision of energy’’ (Formalism in Twentieth Century South African Art. In: Lize van Robbroeck (ed) (2011) Visual Century: South African Art in Context . Wits University Press). Even Walter Battiss’ Fook Island project of the late-1970s, with its magical realism, was not such a far-fetched notion after all during that time. Wilhelm van Rensburg