On August 8, 1949, a reflective self-portrait of Gerard Sekoto was featured in Time magazine to publicize the exhibition Contemporary South African Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture at the Washington National Gallery of Art. This work—painted not long before he left South Africa to live in exile in Paris—was the subject of Sekoto’s telling comments to his biographer Barbara Lindop many years later. Reflecting his profound sadness about his native country at the time, he wrote of his self-portrait, “What you are reading from my expression is not fear but mostly mistrust and deep agony about contradictory attitudes among people as a whole. I think it is more of sensitivity than intelligence. I do not have a particular fear but am looking into the future of our country with much anxiety, yet fully determined to live this life as everybody does—through using one’s own personal walking sticks.”
The artist would have been astonished to learn that his self-portrait would sell on the first Joburg Art Fair in 2008 for R5,000,000 ($670,000).
Sekoto was never to see his homeland again, and he died in an old age home for artists near Paris at the age of eighty in 1993. He retained his connections to South Africa, however, keeping contact with many South Africans either passing through Paris or in political exile. He also remembered the country of his birth in his art. Alongside his sometimes formulaic sketches of Parisian and Senegalese street life, he continued to reimagine the landscapes of his youth in his paintings. Perhaps inevitably, the freshness of his early vision had dulled.
In 1976 the news of the violent police response to protestors rallying against the apartheid government first in Soweto and then across the country galvanized Sekoto to a have a very direct response. He painted Untitled (two men in chains, 1977, pages 8–9). Set against a map of Africa, the faces of the two chained men in Sekoto’s painting scream in existential pain.
Forcefully expressing the “deep agony” that Sekoto used to describe his feelings, this expressive painting is one of the artist’s most powerful works.
Self Portrait 1946–47
Unsigned oil on canvas/board
45 x 34.5 cm
Private collection. Cape Town
Image courtesy of the Michael Stevenson Gallery
Photographer: Mario Todeschini
© The Gerard Sekoto Foundation