Peter Haden - Almost Forgotten

7 Outline of an artist The bare bones of Haden’s biography give little away: He was born on 30 April 1939 in Johannesburg. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from the University of the Witwatersrand and studied Physics at the University of Oxford in England from 1960 to 1962. He died on 20 December 1997, in Geneva, Switzerland, and is survived by his wife Angela (née Goldman) and their children Sarah, Georgina and Eva. It was while he was studying at Oxford that Haden realised he was ‘out of depth’ in a field that wasn’t his own and embarked on a new course: He met a Catholic priest who was doing medicine, who painted for relaxation and who one day said ‘Come on, you paint a picture’. From then on, the young South African was enthralled and utterly seduced by the outlet it gave him and the ‘fantastic magic’ of colours. ‘I couldn’t stop’ he says. Along the line, however, he did slow down and to all intents stopped painting as sculpture overtook him. (Marshall Lee, ‘In Search of his Art Soul, Peter Haden Leaves S.A. Backwater’, The Star , 24 April 1971). Shirley Eskapa writes that: Peter Haden thus became a sculptor without the benefits or defects of any formal training. His sculpture reflects his multi-dimensional vision of life … He believes that art is ‘an inborn instinct’ and said ‘when I make a piece of sculpture, I love it without sentiment. Suddenly a sculptural solution presents itself – in a haptic fashion which I call instinct – that line has to be changed to go to another point and suddenly the whole thing works – often I am really surprised at the result. Some people call it inspiration but that reeks of some sort of sentiment – it is in fact instinct’. (Shirley Eskapa, ‘Peter Haden’, Artlook 27 , February 1969, p. 24). After returning to South Africa, Haden established an art school in Craighall, Johannesburg, that he hoped would ‘fill a wider and more important need. He had hoped that ‘The Academy’ would be a meeting-place for artists – a place where art and its problems would find free discussion’: A dramatic evolution of the Johannesburg art scene is distinctly at odds with the Department of Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand. Sculpture is excluded as a major (lack of facilities?) and painting triumphs on a solitary pedestal. But Johannesburg, as in its mining camp day, accommodates its necessities, and there are several private art schools. Amongst them is ‘The Academy’ … The principal is the sculptor, Peter Haden. Doctors, lawyers, matriculation and University students and grandmothers are among his pupils. (Shirley Eskapa, ‘Student Exhibition at the Academy,’ Artlook 26 , January 1969, pp. 6–7). Students at ‘The Academy’ included Wopko Jensma, Cyril Kumalo, Julian Motau, Stanley Nkosi, Naomi Press and Wendy Vincent. Although Haden curated a successful joint exhibition at the school in 1968, he felt that the venture was yet to achieve his wider ambitions.