Ben Arnold converted to the Islamic faith in 1981. He grew up among Muslims in Albertville and was drawn to the Islamic faith early in his life. Despite his upbringing in a Protestant home, the ecstatic dancing of dervishes captivated his imagination. His parents were respected members of the Dutch Reformed Church in which his father served as an elder… Arnold is basically a sculptor and he works predominantly in clay.
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Omar Badsha is a self-taught artist who first received mentorship from his father, who was also an artist and a commercial photographer. His career dates from the early 1960s when he was part of a generation of artist-activists of the immediate post-Sharpeville era. His early work consisted of drawing and woodcuts. He was influenced on one hand by his father’s interest in Arabic calligraphy, Read More…
A committed feminist, Bernstein, together with Ray Alexander Simons, founded the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW) which was to become what was once described as ‘the most dynamic of women’s organisations in the history of South Africa’. Although neither women were able to attend FEDSAW’s inaugural conference on account of their being banned, they helped to draw up the Women’s Charter… Read More…
Bester’s meteoric rise as an artist is well known and should not require repeating here. This relatively unassuming painting entitled Water carriers filling buckets (plate 248) is both interesting and historically important because it stands at that critical trajectory between Bester’s emerging confidence as a young artist and his subsequent incorporation of mixed media. This is a breakthrough that was to establish his reputation… Read More…
Like Hezekiel Ntuli (qv.), Gerard Bhengu’s remarkable skill attracted much attention from a largely white patronage, and he too, despite the support of some of these patrons, was ultimately prevented from embarking on a formal art training for fear that it would spoil and corrupt his ‘natural’ gift. Bhengu’s talent as a portraitist and landscape painter was not without admirers in black intellectual circles. Read More…
Gregoire Boonzaier was one of South Africa’s longest-lived and most popular artists, and embodied many apparent contradictions in his work. In 1991 Albert Werth noted that in Boonzaier ‘we see unified … the two poles of conservatism and … experimentation’.1 Gregoire became a powerful figure in the South African art world of the 1930s and 40s, first as Chairman of the New Group in 1938… Read More…
It is highly possible that the watercolour portraits painted by Arthur Butelezi were of people that he knew very well. This would distinguish them to some extent from the colonial ‘native studies’ by most white artists at that time which usually lacked a direct relationship with the sitter. Like the great pioneer of western art in West Africa, Aina Onabolu (1882–1963), Butelezi wanted to abolish notions that: Read More…
Albert Chauke is the best known and the oldest member of the family. Totemic, pig-like figures such as The pig lady (plate 268) are the only subject repeatedly carved by him. The earliest in this series (of which four are known) is owned by the University of the Witwatersrand Art Galleries. The two pieces by him in the Campbell Smith Collection appear to be more like copies rather than a development of a theme.Read More…
Peter Clarke is an extremely versatile artist, a book illustrator, a poet, a gifted writer of short stories, and a book-binder. As a printmaker he has been influenced by the prints of the German Expressionists and by Japanese woodcuts. He also has a strong interest in 20th-century Mexican artists such as Diego Rivera (1886–1957) and David Siqueiros (1896–1974). Their subject matter, Read More…
It seems an irony, if not a contradiction, that W.H. Coetzer, an artist who is closely identified with the spirit of Afrikaner Nationalism and history, should figure in a collection and have deliberate inclusion on an exhibition that celebrate ‘the neglected tradition’ in South African art. It has to be accepted that the selection of this image has everything to do with its subject which is a highly unusual one for this artist. Read More…
Welcome Danca is another young KwaZulu-Natal artist who has emerged from what may be termed the ‘school’ of the late Trevor Makhoba (qv.). He worked and studied under Makhoba for four years. Danca would have come to wider national attention a few years ago, but for the demise of the Brett Kebble Art Awards for 2006. One of his paintings, Ikhiwane elihle ligcwala izibungu (plate 54), Read More…
Sibusiso Duma is a young artist who is presently making his mark within the Durban art scene. His talent was noticed and nourished by the late Trevor Makhoba (qv.) through his Philange Art Project based in Umlazi, a township south of Durban where Makhoba had built a studio space behind his house. For four years Duma was under Makhoba’s tutelage, and has since shared a stage with… Read More…
Very little has been written on the art of Diederick During, even though he was a frequent exhibitor in the 1950s and 60s and is well-represented in important collections of South African art. His work was also included in an important art anthology, 150 South African Paintings, Past and Present, published in 1989.1 His training under Maurice van Essche (qv.), a Belgian émigré from the Congo… Read More…
Zwelidumile Jeremiah Mgxaji is better known as Dumile Feni. As a child Dumile developed an interest in carving and drawing and in the early 1960s he was apprenticed briefly to the Block & Leo Wald Sculpture, Pottery and Plastics Foundry in Jeppe, Johannesburg. He received no formal art Training but while being treated at the Charles Hurwitz South African National Tuberculosis Hospital (SANTA)… Read More…
Emily Fern was an important figure in the Johannesburg art world for nearly fifty years. While still very young she was taught to paint in oils by a nun at the End Street Convent after her parents settled nearby in 1890. She was one of the first students at the Johannesburg School of Art, and as such became a member of the Johannesburg Sketch Club in 1916. She was an associate of the painter… Read More…
The short-lived but gregarious Judith Gluckman, who died aged forty-six in 1961, was once a prominent figure, principally in Johannesburg and Pretoria art circles. Although physically imposing, she suffered from continuous bouts of poor health. Gluckman was known for her life-long friendship with Alexis Preller (1911-1975) and her involvement in his social circle. The daughter of well-to-do Jewish parents…Read More…
Greaves was renowned for her work in a field now seen as peculiar to the colonial period. This was the ‘native study’. The genre emerged in South Africa at this time as the result of efforts by the likes of Leo François (1870–1938), President of the Natal Society of Artists (NSA), to create a school of figure painting as an antidote to the prevalence of landscape in South African painting. An incentive for this… Read More…
Hlongwa, like other followers of Trevor Makhoba (qv.), such as Themba Siwela (qv.), is an artist concerned with social issues. Whereas Siwela shows a more humorous approach to these in his work, Hlongwa takes a more serious stance, questioning ‘positive’ aspects of the new South Africa. In Aphamadoda (Where are the men?) (plate 55) he interrogates the new policies intended to give equal status to women… Read More…
Jackson Hlungwani had no formal training as an artist and learned to carve from his father who made utility items for his community. He spent time as a migrant worker in Johannesburg but returned home after an industrial accident in which he lost a finger. Hlungwani’s earliest extant sculptures date to the 1960s, although it is the work of the 1980s and later that became widely known and appreciated. Read More…
This work (plate 231) is a typical example of Jantjes’ first body of mature works: photographic silkscreens that dealt directly with apartheid and resistance. It incorporates several well-known images of the 1976 Soweto uprising, including one by Peter Magubane, as well as lesser-known photographs, not least George Hallett’s picture of the artist Dumile Feni (qv.) giving a defiant two’s up. The confrontational theme of the print…Read More…
Sfiso Ka-Mkame is largely self-taught but his career was promoted by participation in Community Arts Workshops, Abangani Open School and the Thupelo workshops started by David Koloane and Bill Ainslie in Johannesburg in the mid-1980s. Ka-Mkame speaks of them as ‘milestones’ that took his work to another level. His ‘love letters’ of the 1980s were created at the height of the turbulence of the apartheid era… Read More…
Born and trained in Ireland, Dorothy Kay was a member of the Elvery family, which was the subject of one of her most famous group portraits (1938), now in the collection of the Iziko SA National Gallery (The Kay Bequest). The artist’s sister, Beatrice, Lady Glenavy (1881-1970) was a highly-active painter, stained glass designer and associate of Sir William Orpen.Read More…
Born in a rural homestead near Potgietersrus in 1916, Job Kekana made his first carvings while a herd boy. His father, a lay preacher and carpenter, died when Job was young, but had an important influence in that he wanted his son to have a Christian upbringing; as a result Job’s mother sent him to the only church school in the area, Anglican St Stephen’s at Rooisloot. A priest recognised the boy’s talent and in 1933… Read More…
Thomas Kgope is a Tswana and grew up in an area that was predominantly Ndebele in culture. His artistic career began in 1986 when he met Norman Catherine (b.1949), one of South Africa’s most successful artists and a former student-associate of Walter Battiss (1906–1982). Until then Kgope had practised for some years as a freelance photographer, establishing himself as a qualified electrician in 1985. Read More…
Kobeli lived in Kroonstad, the town of his birth, as well as Alexandra and Soweto in Johannesburg. He has been referred to by some as the ‘Chagall of Soweto’, and works such as his earlier Soweto Vision VI (1980)1, and Impressions (undated)2 seem to justify this tag in some ways. Like Chagall, he experimented with freely-arranged areas of abstraction which incorporate figurative elements which vary in scale. Read More…
Welcome Mandla Koboka works in most of the media associated with drawing and painting. His subject matter is mostly drawn from the daily life in the ‘townships’, but in this watercolour of 1978 (plate 24) he resorts to a subject that has clear associations with the political struggle in South Africa. The prisoner is a spontaneous watercolour painting executed over an underlying drawing. Read More…
Deszo Koenig emigrated to South Africa from Hungary in 1931. After his training at the Hungarian Academy in Budapest he won a scholarship which allowed him to study further in Germany, France and Italy. Although he exhibited frequently in South Africa, as well as in New York, Paris, Milan, Israel and London, where he received glowing reviews in the British Press, his reputation has been obscured since his death… Read More…
[He] remembers that students at Rorke’s Drift found Kubeka an inspiring class mate, but they were only at the Centre for the first six months of 1975, while Otto Lundbohm was still teaching, after which they were asked to leave, apparently because they had spent all their time in the printmaking studio. Although Kubeka did not return to Rorke’s Drift as Mabaso did, he continued his career as a printmaker. Read More…
Sydney Alex Kumalo went to school in Diepkloof, Soweto. He began studying at the Polly Street Art Centre in 1952, working there under Cecil Skotnes (qv.) until 1957. In 1958 and 1959 Kumalo worked under the mentorship of the sculptor Eduardo Villa – an artistic apprenticeship which crucially honed and shaped his style and sensibility. It was Villa who introduced Kumalo to Modernist sculptors like Marino Marini and Henry Moore, Read More…
Amos Langdown was involved for many years in art education. The influence and guidance of Katrine Harries (1914–1978) is discernible in his work, which always has a firm basis in sound drawing, composition and a graphic quality that is particularly evident in his lithographs. Although influenced by the great French cartoonist, lithographer and draughtsman Honoré Daumier (1808–1879), Read More…
This well-documented work by Maggie Laubser (plate 15) is signed and dated 1925, and forms part of what is referred to as her ‘Oortmanspost phase’, which lasted from c.1924 to 1928. This period commenced with her return to South Africa in November of 1924 from the cosmopolitan artistic circles of Weimar Berlin to a life of seclusion on the farm Oortsmanspost near Klipheuvel, 45-odd kilometres from Cape Town. Read More…
Ezrom Legae was educated at St Cyprians Primary School and Madibane High in Diepkloof, Soweto. He studied at the Polly Street and Jubilee Art Centres between 1959 and 1964 under Cecil Skotnes (qv.) and Sydney Kumalo (qv.). On the latter’s retirement in 1964, Legae was appointed art instructor at Jubilee Art Centre, later becoming co-director of that institution. In 1970, Legae was awarded… Read More…
Simon Moroke Lekgetho was self-taught, despite lessons in drawing taught at the occupational school in Middelburg, Mpumalanga. On completion of his training, he moved to Pretoria where he worked as a clerk for the Provincial Administration. While there he obtained his matriculation certificate through correspondence. Apart from books on drawing and painting techniques which he acquired for private study, Read More…
Considered in the 1940s to be South Africa’s premier society portraitist, Lewis was steeped in the tradition of British painting and internalised to a high degree the style of Augustus John (1878–1961). The latter’s prolific output was concerned with the lucrative demand to portray members of British society. He also took much interest in a romanticised portrayal of the life of ‘marginal’… Read More…
Although the name of Lippy Lipshitz is synonymous with South African sculpture, it is little-known that he produced a small body of paintings. As a sculptor, and like many other sculptors of note, he felt drawn to drawing and graphic media in preference to paint. He thus made many small works on paper in the form of monotype prints, woodcuts and pastel drawings. Room to let is a work of 1961, Read More…
While a Fine Arts student during the State of Emergency in the mid 1980s, Louw’s personal relationships took her into Langa, one of Cape Town’s oldest townships. There she witnessed the heavy-handedness of the apartheid government’s security forces, experiences that she drew on for a series of woodcuts and monoprints. Several of these works contrast the intrusive might of apartheid, Read More…
In the early 1980s Mabasa was commissioned to make a set of clay figures for the then Venda Development Corporation. At about the same time she started making single free-standing figures that are about a metre high and face forwards with no shifts and turns in their bodies. Sometimes they make a small gesture like lighting a cigarette. This style is partly due to the limitation of the coarse clay Read More…
Fikile grew up in a politicised home. His parents and maternal grandmother were imprisoned in the 1960s and in 1984 Fikile was also incarcerated. His father Arthur Magadledla, an avid reader, instilled in Fikile a lifelong interest in numerology. He allowed his toddler son to scribble-draw in his books. At the age of four Fikile was already addicted to art and one of the books…Read More…
Mahlangu’s inventiveness as a printmaker has been commented on by Philippa Hobbs and Elizabeth Rankin in their joint publications on South African Printmaking in 1997 and 2003,1 and he received special mention from the American art critic Clement Greenberg when he visited South Africa in 1975. A student at Rorke’s Drift with the late Thami Mnyele and Paul Sibisi (qv.), Mahlangu was initially inspired by… Read More…
Born in Lamontville, Durban, Zamani Makhanya experienced the trauma of losing his brothers one after the other to genetic heart-related conditions. The youngest in his family, Makhanya enrolled at the University of Fort Hare in 1979 and graduated in 1985 with both an Honours Degree in Fine Arts and a Higher Diploma in Education. As a student Makhanya won several awards and his work… Read More…
Trevor Makhoba’s art is uniquely grounded in his experience of life and contemporary events in KwaZulu-Natal. He reflects on this experience, as Andy Mason has noted, with elements of the satirical ‘that combines social realism with the surreal’.1 Another recent observation on his work locates it within the traditions of black art in KwaZulu-Natal, as an extension of the work of Gerard Bhengu (qv.) for example, Read More…
Enos Molapo Makhubedu grew up in Pilgrim’s Rest where he completed his higher primary school studies in 1951 at the Charles Max Secondary School. From 1951 to 1958 he attended the Kilnerton Training Institution at Lady Selborne in Pretoria where two teachers, Mrs Lekala and Mr Selokwane, noticed his talent for drawing and colour. After his father’s death in 1964… Read More…
Manana was born in Escourt, KwaZulu-Natal. He has been working as an artist since the mid 1980s and is largely self-taught. A few years ago he received an award from the Tito Zungu Trust Fund, created in the name of the late artist Tito Zungu which provides subsidies to South Africans wishing to study art. Manana enrolled at the Durban Institute of Technology for a diploma in Fine Arts, which he completed in 2003. Read More…
Ernest Mancoba has been described as the most important artist in any genealogy of African modernism: “… he is Africa’s most original modern artist, but, more importantly, he enters the space of modernism formed and perpetuated by the colonial myth of white racial supremacy and superiority and demolishes it from within”. Partly because of his own modest persona and partly because he spent most of his artistic career in exile, …Read more…
Without doubt Billy Mandindi was one of the most exciting artists to have emerged through the community arts sector in the 1980s. Viewed by some contemporaries as a teen prodigy, Mandindi’s precocious talent is clearly visible in early works such as Man amongst men (plate 241) where he skilfully juxtaposed divergent modes of drawing (naturalistic, expressionistic, comic, and iconic)… Read More…
Born in Durban, Maqhubela moved with his family to Johannesburg in 1951. In 1957, while still at school at Nakene High School in Orlando, Soweto, Maqhubela, encouraged by Ephraim Ngatane (qv.), enrolled for art classes at the Polly Street Art Centre, where he studied under Cecil Skotnes (qv.) and Sydney Kumalo (qv.), later also studying at Polly Street’s successor, the Jubilee Art Centre well into the 1960s. Read More…
A self-taught artist with little formal schooling, Maseko began painting in 1959. These early works are painterly examples of everyday scenes that recall Ephraim Ngatane (qv.), and to a lesser extent Louis Maqhubela (qv.), both of whom were Maseko’s contemporaries. They are dated 1964 (plate 120) and 1968 (plate 121). The latter work shows his departure from a realist idiom to a more abstract one. Read More…
As a schoolboy in the former Transvaal, Maseko was fond of drawing. When he left school he initially began work as a house painter for an interior decorator. He was intrigued by the paintings and the framed reproductions that he saw in the homes of his employer’s clients and was inspired to take up artistic painting of his own. He acquired watercolours and oil paints and taught himself by reading and acquiring books… Read More…
This is an early work by Mashile (plate 41), painted when he was only 20, some time between his completing high school and enrolling at the Johannesburg Art Foundation. As might be expected, it is a good example of a young artist’s struggling to come to terms with observational painting and the issues of naturalism. The immediacy of this painting suggests that it is observed from an actual scene. Read More…
Although younger than many of the sculptors from rural northern Limpopo, Johannes Maswanganyi, similarly, had no institutional art training; his father taught him to carve traditional and functional items such as utensils and headrests. His work was included in the 1985 Tributaries exhibition with two nyamisoro figures (seated figures of traditional healers). Based on the traditional Tsonga medicine containers, Read More…
Matsoso’s art is an enigmatic one, an art imbued with presence that frequently makes no obvious literal statement. Matsoso is also a painter and graphic artist and since c.1973 has also produced drawings in colour, although he is best known for his monochromatic drawings from the early 1970s. Typically these consist of finely drawn figures stripped of superfluous details and offset against blank backgrounds. Read More…
Azaria Mbatha occupies an important place in the history of printmaking in South Africa, particularly with regard to his influence on a host of black artists who practised printmaking. However, his role and position in that history is the subject of debate and not as straightforward as has sometimes been portrayed. Regarded by many as the ‘quintessential’ black South African artist, Mbatha has spent all but a fraction… Read More…
Eric Mbatha had a longer relationship with Rorke’s Drift than most artists, being associated with the centre for most of the 1970s. He was part of the second intake of artists who commenced classes in 1971. The early 1970s saw a greater emphasis on intaglio printmaking at the centre, and this included etching, aquatint, drypoint and even mezzotint. Students were also encouraged to experiment by printing etchings in colour, Read More…
Gladys Mgudlandlu lost her own mother at an early age and her first 12 years were spent with her grandmother. In 1957, at the age of forty – the same year as the death of the grandmother, who had taught her to paint murals as a young girl and instilled in her a love of Fingo and Xhosa tradition – Gladys Mgudlandlu began to paint seriously. She enjoyed success and recognition from the beginning, holding her first solo exhibition in 1961. Read More…
Themba Mhlongo started modelling with clay as a young man, concentrating mainly on cattle and other animal shapes. These were made on an intimate scale. He later diversified his approach to sculpture by trying his hand at carving in wood. Mhlongo also did clay studies of the human figure in the form of small portrait busts, like this example of an unknown man (plate 77) in the Campbell Smith Collection. Read More…
Ngiyazisa Ngomafungwase Wakethu, (I am crying for our elder sister), a work in oil pastel on paper by Jerome Mkhize (plate 324), was featured on the exhibition Untold Tales of Magic: Abelumbi. This exhibition was curated by Jill Addleson of the Durban Art Gallery in 2002, and it toured South Africa thereafter. Mkhize made a terrifying image that deals with the clandestine killings that are sometimes carried out in Zulu communities… Read More…
Like Arthur Butelezi (qv.), Simoni Mnguni’s work belongs to an earlier period, and he was one of the first black South Africans to work seriously as a painter. He adopted watercolour, that most English and most accessible of painting mediums. In 19th-century England, watercolour painting had become a popular and polite accomplishment. Its portability ensured that the medium was taken up in the British colonies, Read More…
A former student of Cecil Skotnes (qv.) and Sydney Kumalo (qv.), Mogano is best known for his detailed, quasi-naturalistic narratives of ‘township’ life as well as his more mannered explorations of ancestral Africa. Both of these ‘different’ Moganos make good use of the artist’s imagination, albeit in less or more marked ways… An unassuming image, it raises several questions… Read More…
‘Mohl’ is a simplification for the sake of Europeans of the Tswana surname Motlhakangna.1 As a child, Mohl used to draw with ‘pepa’ on rocks and animal hides. He also modelled objects of clay. His father carved pestles and chairs. At school in Dinokana and later Mafikeng, Koenakeefe (little crocodile) was often reprimanded and punished because of his insatiable urge to draw during classes. Read More…
The influence of Ezrom Legae (1939–1999) (qv.), under whom he studied at the Jubilee Art Centre, is a strong, underlying feature of his work. Mokgosi has however synthesised from his teacher and other diverse sources an idiom that is uniquely his own. African legends, the Bible as well as Greek mythology fired his visual imagination. Stylistically, to some extent, the cross-hatching of forms in the work of Judith Mason (b.1938)… Read More…
In 1963, brimming with talent and burning with the anger that was to find expressionist articulation in his work, the young Motau arrived in Johannesburg, where his special qualities were recognised by the artist Judith Mason, who gave him a space to work and some informal instruction, as well as introducing him to the gallerist, Linda Goodman (Givon), who gave him his first one-person show in 1967. Read More…
Tommy Motswai’s photographic memory owes much to the silences of his world and the racket in his mind, which together give him a right of entry to a strong sense of vision. Born deaf, Motswai hails from Soweto. He enrolled for art classes at FUBA (Federation Union of Black Artists) in 1983 and attended classes at the Johannesburg Art Foundation. He also spent time at the University of Bophutatswana. Read More…
Apart from interaction with artists such as Cyprian Shilakoe (qv.), Bill Ainslie and Fikile Magadlela, it was Moyaga’s mother who played the dominant role in his formation as an artist. She kept alive their traditional religion alongside Christianity. Consequently, her death was a traumatic experience. Moyaga believes that her influence still sustains him in his quest to express the link between daily life and the ancestral presence. Read More…
Clifford Mpai was the Oppenheimer family’s gardener at Little Brenthurst in Johannesburg. His talent and his industriousness as a draughtsman resulted in densely-worked pencil and crayon drawings of garden landscapes and suburban environments. These have a unique charm. Spatial ambiguities, with a tendency to flatten forms and arrange them parallel to the picture-plane, are a central feature of his work. Read More…
Apart from interaction with artists such as Cyprian Shilakoe (qv.), Bill Ainslie and Fikile Magadlela, it was Moyaga’s mother who played the dominant role in his formation as an artist. She kept alive their traditional religion alongside Christianity. Consequently, her death was a traumatic experience. Moyaga believes that her influence still sustains him in his quest to express the link between daily life and the ancestral presence. Read More…
Zwelethu Mthethwa is internationally celebrated for both his colour photographs and his drawings in coloured pastel. Both of these seemingly disparate mediums of expression embody his vivid sense of colour and a pride in his innately African subject matter. They have formed the basis of his appeal and wide acclaim, especially with collectors abroad. Mthethwa’s initial photographic work commenced as a student in the 1980s at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town. Read More…
This work (plate 56) by Mthokozisi depicts a view through the open door of his neighbour’s house in Mpuzuma, outside Pietermaritzburg. The view is framed by the open door with its handle on the right, and by the wall and the door jamb on the left. The house is obviously in a raised position on a hillside similar to that of the other houses seen on the hills across the valley. A power pylon, indicative of the recent electrification of Mpuzuma, Read More…
Although he produced a number of tapestries and paintings while at Rorke’s Drift, Muafangejo is known almost entirely as a printmaker; his linocuts are also particularly well known. In this respect, Azaria Mbatha (qv.), who favoured the medium, influenced Muafangejo as did many other artists who studied at Rorke’s Drift. In addition, the relative inexpensiveness of the medium and the fact that it does not require… Read More…
Before Nelson Mukhuba became a full time carver he worked as a migrant worker in Johannesburg on several different projects. During the 1960s he formed various Marabi dance bands and made recordings. Like all the carvers from the rural north who are represented in the Campbell Smith Collection he was untrained in a formal sense. His experience of the city appears in some works; for example… Read More…
Lucy Mullins, by her marriage to Brian Wiles, became a member of the well-known Wiles family who have been artists for several generations and long domiciled in the Knysna region of the Eastern Cape. The style and range of subjects taken up by the artists of this family as a whole has always been conventional, ranging for landscape to portraiture, which they practised to great public acclaim. Read More…
Although Albert Munyai remembers his grandfather carving, he taught himself to carve in 1985 under the guidance of his brother-in-law, Samuel Nethengwe. It was at this time that he carved his first spoons, bowls and walking sticks. He now works full-time as an artist. When the artist David Roussow (b.1959) befriended Munyai in 1986, he showed him images of Michelangelo’s sculptures. Munyai was inspired and his work developed further. Read More…
Selby Mvusi matriculated from Adams College at Amanzimtoti in 1948. After he had completed his university studies he enrolled for a special course in art education at Ndaleni Teachers’ Training College where he benefited from the guidance of Alfred Ewan, a landscape painter, and Peter Atkins, a sculptor. Mvusi then registered for a BA degree in Fine Arts at UNISA in 1954 when he started to teach… Read More…
Selby Mvusi matriculated from Adams College at Amanzimtoti in 1948. After he had completed his university studies he enrolled for a special course in art education at Ndaleni Teachers’ Training College where he benefited from the guidance of Alfred Ewan, a landscape painter, and Peter Atkins, a sculptor. Mvusi then registered for a BA degree in Fine Arts at UNISA in 1954 when he started to teach… Read More…
Ephraim Mojalefa Ngatane was born in Maseru, Lesotho (then Basutoland) in 1938, moving to Johannesburg in about 1943. He was educated at Mooki Memorial School, where his talent was recognised and promoted from an early age by his primary school teacher, Mrs E.L. Mooki, and later at the Orlando High School in Soweto. Between 1952 and 1954, he studied painting at the Polly Street Art Centre… Read More…
Lindelani was born in KwaMaphumulo and presently lives and works in uMkhumbane (Cato Manor). In his series of sculptures entitled Memory, Meditation and Metamorphosis (plates 316-318), the artist has woven three sculptures of female bodies in wire. The intricacy and the intense labour that this process demands has strong resonance with the titles and conveys a loaded statement on the political situation in South Africa at present. Read More…
Sam Nhlengethwa is unquestionably a city artist born and bred; he still lives in an urban centre on the East Rand. It is the city, with its bustling life, that excites and interests him and around which his identity as person and artist resides and resonates. Typical is a work in the collection entitled The party (plate 291); it deals with everyday reality, not fantasy, and importantly, the medium is collage. Read More…
Nguni cattle and Zulu men and women. These small figures were well-known in the Eshowe area for some 40 years prior to Ntuli’s death and were collected by local residents, tourists and notable personalities in South Africa’s colonial administration. His remarkable talents had been noticed when he was only seventeen by Dr John Holloway of the Native Economic Commission in Natal. Holloway was of the opinion that NtulI… Read More…
As an artist Nxumalo is self-trained and to reach the desired end-product he has adopted an adventurous and determined approach to his technique and subject matter. He has developed a unique style using his imagination and experience and has come up with work of intricate and intriguing quality. His work is based on acute observation, often omitting the physical human presence. It is nevertheless a testimony… Read More…
Fred Page is best-known for his eerie images which, according to one critic, have made him known as ‘a kind of Hitchcock among painters’.1 Page always used a limited colour range in his work, mostly employing either tempera or acrylic. The artist often claimed that he limited his palette to black and white because of his dire financial circumstances. Page’s early life was unsettled. Read More…
The scope of Pemba’s output reveals the limitations of the generic term ‘township art’ which certain writers and dealers were quick to use to describe the work of emergent black artists. His work embraced portraiture, landscape, group compositions and genre works as well as historical subjects based on memory or his imagination. In the Campbell Smith Collection, Pemba is the sole black artist from the Eastern Cape. Read More…
Marianne Podlashuc’s childhood witness of the horrors of the Nazi occupation of The Netherlands during World War II (1939–1945) left an indelible impression on her. To a large extent this formative experience drew her to record her impressions of suffering and deprivation when she first came to live in South Africa in 1953. Esmé Berman has noted of her that she was ‘possessed of a profound social consciousness and projects it in powerful, Read More…
For those familiar with Alexis Preller’s imaginative talent and his powers as a superb colourist in oil on canvas, this somewhat sombre study of a Pondo woman in charcoal (plate 37) may seem on first inspection to be an uncharacteristic work. It dates from 1938, the same year that he joined the New Group and exhibited with them on their very first show held in Cape Town in May of that year. Read More…
While studying at Rorke’s Drift, Dan Rakgoathe was introduced to a range of influences critical to his future development as an artist. He shared much in common with the approach of Cyprian Shilakoe (qv.) as far as his subject matter is concerned but unlike Shilakoe, who preferred to work in intaglio, Rakgoathe concentrated almost exclusively on linocuts. The linocuts of Azaria Mbatha (qv.) also influenced Rakgoathe… Read More…
Rikhotso was the winner of the prestigious Brett Kebble Award for 2004, an honour that he shared with Tanya Poole from Grahamstown. His career dates back to the early 1980s. He hails from the Limpopo Province where he was born in 1945 to Shangaan parents. Limpopo is a province possessing some of South Africa’s best artists working in the sculptural idiom. His aptitude for carving combines an ancestral influence… Read More…
Winston Saoli’s father, the Rev. Russell Saoli, was the headmaster of the Arthurseat Lower Primary School in Acornhoek when Winston was born in 1950. He was the second of six children. Saoli’s education began at his father’s school and he attended the Morris Isaacson School in Moroka when the family moved to Soweto in 1963. Here he was exposed to a variety of influences, and opportunities became available… Read More…
The most remarkable feature of Segogela’s work is its scale; some of his works can even fit into the palm of a human hand. It is scale matched with attention to detail, and reveals a close observation of life. Features on faces, clothing buttons, ties and especially shoes are rendered with care. Over time a few slightly larger figures were carved but these were seldom more than 45cm high. Read More…
After graduating as a teacher in 1938, Gerard Sekoto taught at the Khaiso School, an Anglican institution situated near Polokwane (Pietersburg). While there, Ernest Mancoba (1904–2002), a colleague, encouraged Sekoto to go to Paris to further his career as an artist. Mancoba himself left for Paris soon afterwards. However, Sekoto decided to stay for a while longer in South Africa to broaden his experience of the country and to develop… Read More…
Dr. Phuthuma Seoka achieved a degree of fame during the 1980s as a result of the landmark exhibition Tributaries, curated by Ricky Burnett in 1985, as did Jackson Hlungwani (qv.), Nelson Mukhuba (qv.) and Noria Mabasa (qv.). Like the others, Seoka was not trained formally as a sculptor. He left school when he was 16 years old and by 1953 had established a business in Johannesburg, Read More…
Cyprian Shilakoe, unlike most of the first group of artists at Rorke’s Drift who preferred working in linocut, concentrated on producing etchings that were often combined with aquatint. He was closely associated with Dan Rakgoathe (qv.) and, like him, his work has a profound visionary quality. The atmospheric, dream-like effect in Loneliness (plate 201), an etching and aquatint dated 1971, is typical of Shilakoe’s work. Read More…
Paul Sibisi became prominent during the political unrest and instability of the 1980s, and political activism became a primary focus in his work. During this time genres referred to as ‘Protest Art’ and ‘Resistance Art’, depicting the political unrest of the era arose from the freedom struggle and played a visible role in putting pressure on the apartheid government Sibisi was apparently politicized… Read More…
Sithembiso Sibisi is a self-taught artist who is a highly-skilled draughtsman with a background in mechanical engineering studies. His artistic career began at the Caversham Centre for Artists and Writers in Howick, KwaZulu-Natal where, in the late 1980s, he began working with masterprinter Malcolm Christian on set projects. During this time he produced outstanding etchings which, Read More…
Durant Sihlali worked in a wide range of media, including painting, sculpture, printmaking and ‘pulp paintings’ where paper and pigments are the primary mediums. Sihlali showed an interest in art from an early age, inspired, in part, by his father whose hobby was drawing and modelling. In 1947 Sihlali won an art competition for learners from Queenstown and surrounding districts.Read More…
Lucas Sithole’s grandmother, Tsayi Numvumi, who was related to Swazi royalty, encouraged him to model in clay from early age. This seems to have first determined his interest in form and eventual emergence as a professional sculptor. Tsayi was an accomplished and famed potter herself, and communicated to her grandson a wealth of stories and legends which seem to have found form and expression in many of his sculptures. Read More…
Themba Siwela is a member of the Durban Cartoon Project and full-time illustrator for a Durban-based publishing and communications company called Artworks. He is, however, better known for his oil pastels, which have been shown in exhibitions nationally. He was recently included in an exhibition entitled Resistance, reconciliation and reconstruction organised by MTN as part of the decade of democracy celebrations in Pretoria in 2004. Read More…
Skotnes is a pivotal figure in twentieth-century South African art. As a member of the younger generation of artists emerging in the 1950s after the Second World War, he assisted notably in generating an art which embraced a South African identity, was more in line with international trends and which renounced the moribund and derivative conventions of the first half of the century. However, it was his role as a cultural officer… Read More…
Irma Stern is still considered to be South Africa’s foremost artist in terms of public recognition and the record prices that her works fetch at an auction.1 At first misunderstood for her highly individual and Modernist style by the conservative and shockable public of Cape Town, she gradually won acceptance and eventually acclaim. Her strong interest in portraying black people was also a point of public controversy, especially in the 1930s. Read More…
A somewhat solitary figure, Alfred Thoba regards himself as a self-taught artist although there is evidence that he had some brief tutelage in Swaziland and later under Bill Ainslie (1934–1989) in Johannesburg. Acknowledging this in an interview in 1990, he remarked that ‘I went to them with the knowledge; I was actually born with it’.1 He started painting full-time in 1974 after working for several advertising companies. Read More…
Enoch Mandlenkosi Tshabalala’s family moved from Mpumalanga to live in Johannesburg in 1945 when he was four years old. At first they lived in Kliptown, but they later settled in Soweto in the year that it was established on the periphery of Johannesburg. Soon after this Tshabalala contracted polio. After treatment at the Johannesburg General Hospital, he was bedridden for a long time. Read More…
Although South African feminist art historians have, over the past 15 years, been engaged in retrieving the marginalised reputations of women whose work has been categorised as ‘craft’ or ‘illustration’ rather than as ‘art’, little serious attention seems to have been paid to Barbara Tyrrell. Marion Arnold’s book, Women and Art in South Africa, which makes a sterling effort to retrieve… Read More…
Maurice van Essche came to Africa as part of a Belgian government-sponsored painting expedition to the Congo in 1939. With the occupation of Belgium by the Germans in 1940, he then came to South Africa. After his arrival he lived briefly in Cape Town and then taught at the Wits Technical College Art School in Johannesburg from 1943 to 1945. He joined the New Group and founded the Continental School… Read More…
University and Technical College Fine Arts departments in South Africa have produced many graduates since they were established at various centres around the country in the first half of the twentieth century. They were, until comparatively recently, mostly exclusively ‘white’ institutions. Of Mary van Wyk we know nothing at present, other than the unverified fact that she was a student under Professor John Oxley… Read More…
The Scots-born Marjorie Wallace made a deep impression on the cultural life of her adopted South Africa. Wallace has been characterised as “a realist painter working in a broad, narrative style” (Berman 1983:483), but this observation underplays her penchant for emphasising flattened areas of oil colour, fairly loosely applied in a light and often bright key. It was an approach that well-captured the light and mood of the Western Cape especially. Read More…
Barely out of high school, Xaba takes a sensitive, private subject and subjects it to analysis. In this painting (plate 325), which is set in a traditional hut, a sangoma is seen in the act of healing a man. This work was exhibited in a group show titled Untold Tales of Magic: Abelumbi, held at the Durban Art Gallery and which travelled nationally during 2001 and 2002. In responding to the theme, Xaba has drawn from… Read More…
Vuminkosi Zulu was born to Solomon Godongwana and Frida (MaMhlongo) Zulu. He started his primary education at Mthombeni Primary School, Maphumulo, in 1960. Here he was selected as the best artist in an inter-school art and craft competition in 1965 and continued developing his talent thereafter. His father, a fruit seller, could keep him at school only up to Standard 7 at Kranskop Secondary School near Ntunjambili. Read More…
He worked on a farm as a labourer between 1957 and 1966. His love for the land permeated his entire life and defined the way he lived until he died. He was a subsistence farmer and an artist. Visits were always prefaced by lengthy discussions about mielies, donkeys, goats, weather and then, art. He held had a brief job at a dairy in Pinetown, just outside of Durban.Read More…
Born in Germany when Adolf Hitler was in power, Manfred Zylla came to South Africa in 1970 and almost immediately produced work which was scathingly direct in its political and social content and highly critical of the National Party’s apartheid system. Zylla dealt directly with topical subjects of the day such as the Soweto uprisings of 1976 and the subsequent events of the turbulent 1980s. This is shown in the print Thami… Read More…
