Welgemeend August Art Month - 2019

14 Born in South West Africa (today Namibia), Stanley Pinker’s artistic lineage can be traced back to the French Impressionists via his teacher, Maurice van Essche, who had studied under Henri Matisse during a brief stay in the South of France in 1933.Van Essche would later go on to establish the Continental School of Art in Cape Town where Pinker was his student from 1947 to 1950. After this critical foundation, Pinker would spend the next decade abroad, living between London and Nice, returning to South Africa only briefly for his first solo show in 1954. This time spent in Europe resulted in Pinker’s sophisticated application of the tenets of modernism. The effortless nuance of his individual artistic language revealed in his paintings set him apart from his contemporaries. Bringing the sensuous gesture of French Impressionism together with the disassembled forms of Cubism and the frantic energy of Futurism, Pinker’s work nevertheless remained preoccupied with a “quiet, ongoing struggle about identity” that was entirely his own. From his roots in Windhoek to the cosmopolitan centres of Europe, Pinker’s oeuvre represents a moment between worlds, where European style and African subject collide in an eclectic marriage of structure and form. Rather than overtly illustrating the toxic politics that defined the time, Pinker instead relied on his “ingenious formal wit and dry, irreverent humour” to “playfully distill the dilemmas, absurdities and ironies of the South African condition”. (Proud in Pinker and Stevenson, 2004:7). Notoriously shy, Pinker’s work presents a cryptic window into his theatrical mind with the canvas becoming the stage upon which his drama takes place. Deeply influenced by the landscape that surrounded him, there is a whimsical poetry in his colour, where one is warmed by the glow of an orange sunset ( Homestead at Sunset ) and chilled by the cold blue of a deep night ( Vision ). On his return to South Africa in 1964, Pinker found a new sense of connection with the country beyond the limited scope of Cape Town that had informed his youth. The landscape, he reflects, “provided me with the visual means to explore the ideas that were on my mind”. (Pinker and Stevenson, 2004:15). After some years adrift, working as a freelance illustrator and giving private art lessons, Pinker’s mentor, van Essche again reappeared in his life, offering him a job that would define not only his future, but that of South African Art History. In 1969, at van Essche’s invitation Pinker began lecturing part- time at the Michaelis School of Art at UCT, where he would remain until 1989, influencing the trajectory of an entire generation of artists. The profound sense of the history of painting that Pinker brought with him can be seen in a relatively early work titled Fête Champêtre executed in 1958. A re-interpretation of a High Renaissance painting by the Venetian artist Giorgione that hangs in the Louvre, Pinker’s version demonstrates an investigation into the formal qualities of pictorial space whilst grappling with Cézanne’s use of colour. As one of his personal favorites, Pinker would later describe the work by saying that it revealed his own “rather shakey but enthusiastic version of Cézanne’s theory” which could be seen throughout the painting. (Pinker and Stevenson, 2004:26). The principles of these core preoccupations with space and perspective would become a defining feature of Pinker’s later work, with him identifying most strongly with the way in which the Cubists handled the environmental setting of a painting. For him, space was tactile and began with the Stanley Pinker (1924-2012) background, which would set the stage for the detail and characters that would come later. An example of this distorted and flattened perspective can be seen in His and Hers or Decline and Fall which presents an allegorical take on the post-colonial milieu. In a field of vivid orange set against a thin, pale blue sky, two figures dressed in the colonial finery of an era long gone sit idly as an absurdist drama featuring a pair of matching His and Hers exercise bikes, a toppled Grecian column, a menacing snake in a chamber pot and a Hoopoe and a Hamerkop plays out around them. Brimming with symbolic imagery, the borders of Pinker’s canvasses proved unable to contain his subject matter which by the 1970’s begun to spill out onto the frames of the paintings themselves. Perhaps one of the most definitive examples of this constructivist tendency is Now and Then which demonstrates Pinker at the apex of his satirical power. Using sculptural elements that interact with the dense narrative that takes place on a painted reproduction of an old Ten Rand note bearing the likeness of Jan van Riebeeck, the painting takes square aim at the cyclical nature of history, whilst appealing to the redemptive hope of a distant peace. Despite the textured nature of his criticism, Pinker sat outside the dominant trope of “struggle art” that is often used to describe artists of his generation. Instead his legacy is timeless with the restless ambiguity of his symbols maintaining their currency in a country where the aftermath of the past endures. Matthew Partridge Contemporary Art Specialist, Strauss & Co His and Hers or Decline and Fall (detail) See page 37