Until 2005 black painter and sculptor Dumile Feni, who often went by his first name only, was known in the country of his birth more for a thirty-year exile and his sudden death in New York in 1991 than for his actual work.
Although his work had been included in The Neglected Tradition: Towards a New History of South African Art at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG), an important exhibition of black artists curated by Steven Sack in 1988, it was not until the comprehensive retrospective curated by Prince Mbusi Dube opened at the JAG in January 2005 that an extended range of Feni’s explosive drawings and paintings broke this visual silence.
Discussing the qualities that established Feni’s luminous reputation and set him apart from his peers, respected critic Ivor Powell wrote in his review of the exhibition (Art South Africa, Vol. 3.4): “Where Feni is incandescently different is that he never merely repeats an inherited formula—as most of his contemporaries did in pursuit of sales. There is always an edge, willfulness and a confrontational quality to the work that takes it into another dimension.”
Born in 1942 in the small town of Worcester in the Western Cape, Feni drew prodigiously on every available surface as a child, although he never received formal art lessons. When hospitalized in Johannesburg at twenty-one for a bout of tuberculosis, he painted murals on the hospital’s walls along with fellow patient Ephraim Ngatane, an artist who later introduced him to the influential art teacher Cecil Skotnes. Feni’s work attracted the attention of Madama Haenggi, director of Gallery 101 in downtown Johannesburg, and he had his first—very successful—solo show in 1966. More success followed, but as a black man from the rural areas, he was still unable to get legal permission to live in Johannesburg: As an artist, he was unable to demonstrate to the authorities that he was in full-time employment, the necessary requirement for residence.
This has been understood to be the reason Dumile went into exile in 1968, but his public affair with white American society beauty Mary McFadden, who was married to Johannesburg businessman Philip Harari at the time, has also been named as a reason for his departure. “The police were after him for offenses under the Immorality Act,” says Linda Givon of the Goodman Gallery, where Dumile had his last solo show before his departure. Under apartheid, love across the color line was against the law.
After several years in London, Dumile traveled to the United States, where he was Artist in Residence at the Institute of African Humanities, University of California, Los Angeles, and eventually settled in New York. He died there of a heart attack in 1991, shortly before a planned return to South Africa.
“Like Picasso, Dumile lived like a real artist, or how people think an artist lives,” says Givon. “He drew constantly, he was brilliant—people called him ‘the Goya of the townships.’ ”
The Classroom Undated
Conté and charcoal on paper
96.5 x 22.9 cm
Image courtesy of Bruce Campbell Smith
Collection of Bruce Campbell Smith
© The Dumile Feni Foundation
Banking Deposit c. 1967
Charcoal on paper
243 x 102 cm
Image courtesy of the Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town
Private collection, London
Photographer: Mario Todeschini
© Dumile Feni Foundation