Chapter 01 - The Stifling Years: A Time of Exile

GAVIN JANTJES Colour These People Dead, from A South African Colouring Book (Folder with eleven prints) 1974–75
Silkscreen print with collage
45 x 60 cm
each Edition size: 20 with 3 A/P
Published by Gavin Jantjes
Collection of Gavin Jantjes
© Gavin Jantjes

In the first post-World War II election in the Union of South Africa in 1948, the right wing Afrikaans-speaking National Party came to power in a shock win, unseating the largely English-speaking United Party under Jan Christiaan Smuts, a world statesman who had been a close confidant and advisor to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill during World War II.

The ascent to power of the National Party marked the beginning of forty-two years of the segregationist and discriminatory policies that came to be known as apartheid, a term that has since entered the global dictionary as a terse description of a merciless system of racial discrimination.

While the main focus of this book is the development of contemporary art in South Africa from 1968 to 2008, this first chapter will attempt to give a background to that development and look at some of the pioneers in the field of art, including those who left to continue their careers elsewhere.

By the 1960s, as a result of the National Party’s stringent policies, a long series of inhumane legislative acts had been enforced, privileging whites over other race groups and affecting every aspect of life in the country. Laws governed in which area each race group could live, to which jobs one could aspire, and to whom one could be married.

Education on all levels was segregated. If you were an aspiring white art student, you could be accepted by one of the art departments at the white universities or technical colleges. If you were an art student of any other race, this avenue was closed. Regional art centers, often with extremely limited facilities, were your option.

The best known of these, which had opened in downtown Johannesburg in 1952, was the city-run Polly Street Art Centre, under the direction of white artist Cecil Skotnes. It provided a starting point for an entire generation of black artists like the highly successful sculptor Sydney Kumalo (1935–1988) and draftsman and figurative sculptor Ezrom Legae (1935–1999).

In KwaZulu-Natal, near Durban, there was the Evangelical Lutheran Centre at Rorke’s Drift, which opened in 1962 under the direction of Peder and Ulla Gowenius, sent out by the Church of Sweden Mission to advance art and craft in Africa. Such influential printmakers as Azaria Mbatha and John Muafangejo were trained here.

A picture of the urban art world in the mid-sixties is provided by paging through a monthly art journal named Artlook, launched in November 1966 under the editorship of Desmond Greig. In the first issue black sculptor Sydney Kumalo and rising young star Dumile Feni receive coverage, but otherwise page after page chronicles the achievements of the white artistic community.

Then, I had thought of the abstracted stiffness of most of the constricted figures and landscapes as a dreary South African style. Now I think that this attempt at grafting something of an African modernism onto an essentially Western art training was at least in part an avoidance technique, a lip service to the fact that the artists were living in Africa without really examining what that meant; an outward manifestation of an interior blindness.

All the leading galleries of the time showed work by both white and black artists, but white artists predominated. In Cape Town, the best-known gallerist was Joe Wolpe, who specialized in showing international artists like Henry Moore, David Hockney, and Paul Klee alongside well-known locals such as the expressionist painter Irma Stern and sculptor and painter Cecil Skotnes.

In Johannesburg galleries included the Henry Lidchi Gallery, with an exhibition calendar featuring regular shows by painter Robert Hodgins and the Zimbabwe stone sculptors; Egon Guenther, whose gallery artists included the renowned black sculptor Sydney Kumalo and painter and draftsman Ezrom Legae; and in the midtown area, Gallery 101 under the Swiss-born Haenggi family. The highly talented Dumile Feni, whose lacerating drawings were already drawing considerable attention in the art world, had his first solo show at Gallery 101 in 1966.

Also in 1966 the Goodman Gallery opened in Johannes-burg under the direction of Linda Goodman. Artlook (December 1966) reported that: “The inaugural show included mainly work by European masters such as Chagall, Giacometti, Kandinsky, Klee, Magritte, Matisse, Moore, Picasso, and some [unnamed by Artlook] South Africans.” The fact that Artlook did not consider the South Africans worthy of mention by name underlines the prevailing ethos of that time: Work by internationally famous artists was superior to that of South African artists.

JULIAN MOTAU
Mother and Child 1967
Charcoal on paper
91.3 x 38.5 cm
Collection: Bruce Campbell Smith Collection
© Bruce Campbell Smith Collection

Emerging onto the art scene at the same time as Dumile Feni, and like Feni, completely self-taught, the young black artist Julian Motau was a draftsman of note, working mainly in charcoal, making anguished drawings that expressed black pain: for example, of a man stabbing himself or a woman holding a child, crying to the heavens for help. The Goodman Gallery gave the nineteen-year-old Motau a solo show in October 1967, a considerable achievement for such a young artist. So successful was this inaugural show that the gallery arranged exhibitions in Israel and England, but on February 17, 1968, Julian Motau was shot and killed by thugs in a random killing while visiting friends in Alexandra township, brutally cutting short what had promised to be a brilliant career. He had just turned twenty.

Feni left the country in the same year, 1968. Following his successful show at Gallery 101, Feni’s work began to go into public collections like the Durban Art Gallery and the South African National Gallery in Cape Town. But the success Feni enjoyed as an artist did not bring him the right to live in Johannesburg. Born in Worcester in 1942, in what is now the Western Cape, Feni did not have the right to move to an urban area to live unless he could prove he was in full-time employment. In the eyes of the State, being an artist was not full-time employment, so his residence in Johannesburg was illegal.

For this and for other more personal reasons, Feni decided to leave the country, and was given a one-way exit visa to allow him to go. His departure followed the example of his colleague of a previous generation, the black painter Gerard Sekoto, who after two extremely successful exhibitions in Pretoria and Johannesburg left for Paris in 1947 to further his career.

Another exile was the young black freelance photographer Ernest Cole, who had left the country in 1966 to organize the publication of a book of photographs of the life of black people under apartheid. So iconic of the struggle were Cole’s images that when young Coloured (mixed race) artist Gavin Jantjes left South Africa to study art further in Germany, he used some of Cole’s photographs as source material for his South African Colouring Book (1974–75) series, a series made to expose the injustices of the apartheid system to a European audience.

The sixties in South Africa had started with the bloodbath of Sharpeville, when police fired upon protesters, killing sixty-nine. In the United States in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. made his “I Have a Dream” speech, and the civil rights movement took hold. Paris saw the student protests of 1968. As the sixties drew to a close in South Africa, art, like the rest of the country, seemed in a straitjacket.