An art world institution known both for his own prolific oeuvre and for his lifelong advocacy on behalf of black artists, the white painter, sculptor, and printmaker Cecil Skotnes was a gunner in the South African armed forces in Italy in World War II. Wanting to be an artist from boyhood, it was an experience in Florence that finally determined his lifelong path. He watched the Uffizi Museum staff uncover Michelangelo’s David, the classic Renaissance art treasure, bricked up for protection during the war. Recalls Skotnes, “There it stood in its primeval greatness, and if I still had any doubt as to what career I was going to have, it fell aside.”
Returning to South Africa in 1942, Skotnes then studied art at the University of Witwatersrand. After that for ten years he was the director of the Polly Street Art Centre in downtown Johannesburg. There he encouraged black artists, barred from university attendance because of their race, to use the facilities, turning it into a rare space where young artists could experiment and make work and, most important, learn the skills of how to make one’s way in the art world as a professional career artist.
At the same time, Skotnes was pursuing his own career: making prints, painting, undertaking large-scale mural projects. Says Skotnes, “My work is grounded in an African idiom—I have traversed the entire country, and this has given me a great depth of understanding of the art of Southern Africa before the white man even put his foot here.”
Skotnes’s affinity for printmaking and his enjoyment of cutting into wood led to many series of masterly woodcuts. In these works he addressed themes not only of landscape but also neglected histories. These include the 1828 assassination of the great Zulu chief Shaka by his half-brothers.
Skotnes’s signature style is the large-scale engraved wood panel with pigment rubbed into it. But his concerns over the political turmoil in South Africa surface in a series of allegorical pencil and watercolor drawings made in the 1980s. In these works crucified figures on crosses and gibbets are surrounded by soldiers and an overfed orator addresses his audience, activated by an unseen windup key in his back.
His generosity with his skills and time, his profound spirituality reflected in private and public works across the land, and his influence on an entire generation of artists add up to a contribution that cannot be underestimated. Artist William Kentridge, for example, often tells the story of being given a Skotnes woodcut of an angular cat as a child, and being so influenced by it that the Skotnes cat has stalked through a number of his own works.
The Oration 1987
Pencil and wash on paper
79 x 97 cm
Photographer: Athol Franz
Collection: Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town
© Cecil Skotnes
Untitled 1987
Pencil and wash on paper
41 x 58 cm
Photographer: Michael Hall
Collection: Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town
© Cecil Skotnes