A Meeting of Minds - Louis Maqhubela and Douglas Portway

5 including at the Venice Biennale in 1956. Zen Buddhism and Paul Klee’s example, as well as his dictum, ‘Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible’, contributed to the emergence of Portway’s distinctive mature style. London 62 exemplifies this new approach: thin layers of oil paint are built up on the canvas and then scratched to reveal the underlying colours. The infinite subtleties of pigment, whites, greys and blacks combine to manifest Portway’s characteristic sensuous forms. In Geometric Composition (1974, oil on canvas) semi-transparent hard-edged forms reconcile reality and illusion, opacity and transparency, male and female, ultimately achieving oneness. Maqhubela’s prize included a return air ticket to Europe; he was well informed and well read, but the three months spent abroad transformed his life and work. In the great museums and galleries he encountered the masters of Modernism and abstraction. A major exhibition of Klee’s work in Paris had a profound impact on him. Passing over a chance to meet Francis Bacon, Maqhubela went to St Ives in Cornwall instead. In Portway he found not only a mature and exceptional painter, but also a kindred spirit, someone in search of creativity and expression beyond observed reality, someone who explored the spiritual and metaphysical realms of making art. In an interview appearing in The Star (14 June 1968) shortly after his return, Maqhubela said: ‘I learned a lot from him. We spent many hours discussing art and techniques.’ Maqhubela’s break with the past and his new direction meant the end of figurative expressionism and the beginning of a personal engagement with modernist abstraction, accompanied by the development of an artistic language and iconography inspired by his quest for spiritual growth. His path to a divine source was as a student of the Rosicrucian Order (AMORC). Paintings such as Composition (1971, oil on canvas) and Composition (1972, oil on paper) are characterised by thinly applied layers of paint articulated by means of scraffito, sometimes completely abstract, at other times with figures, birds and animals emerging from the wiry lines, colour and floating shapes. Maqhubela was successful, but the obstacles he and his family faced in apartheid South Africa proved too great for them. They moved to Ibiza in 1973 and settled in London in 1978. He studied at Goldsmiths, University of London (1984–1985), and the Slade School of Fine Art (1985–1988). At the Slade, Maqhubela was exposed to printmaking and in 1986 he produced a series of etchings that count among the most significant in his oeuvre. He continued to exhibit extensively in South Africa, in group as well as solo shows and featured prominently in Esmé Berman’s book, The Story of South African Painting (1975). Stimulated by his new environment, and artists such as Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and John McLean, his work became increasingly abstract. Untitled XIX (1990), with its glorious yellows, blues, greens, purple and orange, is characteristic of the palette and technique of the works in gouache on paper. A trip to South Africa in 1994 to experience the euphoria of freedom firsthand, and again in 2001 to receive medical treatment, had a powerful impact on Maqhubela and gave renewed impetus to his work, bringing thematic and technical changes. Neither Portway nor Maqhubela had immediate successors in the stylistic sense: their art was perhaps too personal and private, too enigmatic to emulate, but – understanding that there was a world beyond the immediate and visible and that it could be revealed through art – they both served as sources of inspiration for their compatriots and artists everywhere. bibliography Berman, Esmé. The Story of South African Painting . Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1975. Berman, Esmé. Art and Artists of South Africa (classic edition). Cape Town: G3 Publishers, 2010. Martin, Marilyn. A Vigil of Departure – Louis Khehla Maqhubela: A Retrospective, 1960–2010 . Johannesburg: Standard Bank Gallery, 2010.