Contemporary African Art

 

 

 

Jane Alexander’s Invisible Reality on the Auction Floor at Strauss and Co. in Johannesburg, South Africa

I have not lived in South Africa for 40 years though I grew up here. I wrote this piece after seeing the work in a press release. When I received the catalogue the interpretation from a South Africa perspective was very different. I had not linked the hybridity of her creatures with the complex ethnic mix of South Africa or tension between racial groups. It is true there are layers of meanings in these works I have not addressed. My interpretation is based on viewing Jane Alexander outside of her time and place. This is how I see her works.

Jane Alexander ranks with other great 20^th Century artists who set out to show the duality of life in which the official perception of everyday reality is independent of the reality of the imagination.  It is the reality of the imagination, of a higher reality, that penetrates far beyond what the eye can or wants to see. Under oppressive regimes; in response to atrocity; or social decadence art plays a vital role in society in challenging the status quo. Jane Alexander ‘s two works coming to auction  at Straus and Co. in Johannesburg–“Untitled” and “West Coast African Angel” – present themselves as part of a 20^th century artistic dialogue where the viewer is not invited to read recognizable art forms or imagery, but to cross over to a reality otherwise invisible.   Anselm Kieffer’s abstract canvasses filled with his own indigenous set of subjects and symbols explore the unseen reality of the fraught territory of German history.

 

 

 Russian Non-Conformist art starting in the 1960s in Soviet Russia was doubly real because it had no relation to reality and it challenged the status of official artistic reality.

 

Dmitry Krasnopevtsev, Still life, stones and skulls (1962).

 When in became accepted in the 1970s it was the beginning of the end of the Soviet Regime. Franics Bacon invited experience of inhumanity through his portraiture of some of the most iconic images of wounded and traumatized humanity in  post-war art. His subjects were always portrayed as violently distorted, presented not as sociable and charismatic types but as isolated souls imprisoned and tormented by existential dilemma. Jane Alexander makes possible, through her sculptures, intense experience of inhumanity and the bestial in man.

Working in the 80’s in South Africa Jane Alexander observed and experienced the increasing conflict and violence between Afrikaans oppressor and the black oppressed. Apartheid, which had segregated white from black since 1948, had by the 1980s reached a crises point. Refusal to accept the degradation of the previous generation, black youth formed subversive groups and with increased protest challenged a system that was intolerable in modern society. Reacting against this threat to the existing establishment, the Afrikaner government became more ruthless, more brutal.   

 

In  Untitled, due to be auctioned on November 11^th, Alexander places a life-size burly figure in a wooden armchair. His decaying flesh is splattered with discoloration. At the rear, his skin is broken open to reveal his brain and spinal column. Draped over his neck is a leather and rubber strap – originally used in the Witwatersrand mines to secure a damaged body to a stretcher to hoist from a shaft. Deprived of a mouth, his face without expression, the figure can merely bear witness to the events in his view, unable to comment, protest, or condone. His eyes do not return one’s gaze but seem to drift off in view of something further, beyond his immediate reach. The placement of the figure on a chair resembles a man strapped to an electric chair, about to be obliterated. The work reaches beyond the gold mines of Johannesburg and its inhuman working conditions; beyond the pain of being black in an Apartheid regime; beyond the daily threat of harm. The work is universal in depicting human suffering.  It reaches back to ancient Roman times. It addresses the ruler and the ruled. For the latter, savaged and broken, life is of no consequence.  For the onlooker this work demands a crossing over from a reality that has seemingly been acceptable to a reality that exits and has been ignored. It is an invisible reality of the depths of inhumanity. In South Africa in the 1980s, this was particularly potent.

Not at auctions at Strauss and Co. but necessary to consider as the counterpart to Untitled is Jane Alexander’s Butcher Boys in the collection of Iziko South African National Gallery. The piece is composed of three life-size sculptures of eerily deformed men with animal horns sitting on a bench as if they are in deep thought. The experience for the viewer is one of discomfort and repugnance. But the work is not limited to its perceived intent of presenting the brutal dehumanizing forces of Apartheid. It could exist in any context addressing the bestial, naked animal forces in man.

The 2^nd piece to be auctioned by at Strauss and Co. is Jane Alexander’s West Coast African Angel. Here a strange creature half bird, half man is frantically riding a bicycle. The creature which most closely resembles a flamingo, a bird normally serene – appears to be both transmuted and coming apart as the thin layer of feathers on its wings cannot support its ability to fly. The bicycle, on which it now relies, is so vital to its existence that the creature has allowed the ascending front bar to penetrate its neck, and the rod is what keeps its head upright. Its fragility encompasses us as we cross from the safe to the unsafe, and acknowledge our own angst in the real reality of our existence

Jane Alexander’s body of work adheres to the 20^th century philosophy of art as an experience. The idea of art as an experience began with the breakdown of religious belief that accompanied 19^th century industrialization and scientific innovations. Reacting against perceived crises with the emergence of a new modern society, some artists looked back to a pre-modern way of experiencing the world and explored immaterial experiences.  However others, as the century progressed, adopted Symbolism, Surrealism, Abstraction, and later Pop as they prioritized the invisible, the unconscious, the irrational and the visionary. The mission of art became one of requiring the viewer to step from the known to the unknown. It requires a mental decision to see things differently. Crossing from the perceived real to what one can not see on one’s own allows for an inner enlightenment, a religious conversion.

Jane Alexander’s work cannot be described as art from the Continent of Africa. It is mainstream Contemporary Art. Whatever the price it achieves at Strauss and Co. on Nov 11^th will be miniscule against its greater destiny.

 

 

 

 

 

 

1920 Dutch Expressionism discovered in South Africa

In every painting there is a story that extends beyond its maker; its time period or the movement in art it represents.  Its story is about the interaction between artists; the social and political environment of the time when it was executed; and the circumstances surrounding its acquisition. Where a painting’s provenance is of continuous ownership over a period of more than half a century its history is bound up with the vision of its collector and the changing times of the collector’s own environment.

Two expressionist paintings by the Dutch artist Jan Wiegers, executed in the early 1920’s in Frauenkirch, Davos are to be auctioned in November in Johannesburg, South Africa. The current owner, himself a collector, inherited the paintings from his father, a Bloemfontein doctor Dr. F.P. Scott.  Dr. Scott bought the paintings in 1940 in Groningen, Holland where he was studying medicine. His purchase was remarkable because despite exposure while in Groningen to the avant-garde in Europe, his visual repertoire since childhood had been influenced by Calvinist puritanism where Dutch Reformed churches are devoid of any decoration.

Art in South Africa was likewise conservative and devoid of human emotion. Yet he acquired deeply emotive works and at a time when Expressionism was no longer fashionable and in fact politically incorrect in Europe.

The two paintings by Jan Wiegers are: “Haus in den Lärchen” and “Still Life with Sculptures”  They are pivotal works because in their style and content they confirm Wiegers’ relationship with Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, founder of the group “Die Bruke”, in Dresden, who adopted a new form of art called Expressionism. The impact of Kirchener on Wiegers would result in German Expressionism making its way to Groningen and impacting members of Wiegers own group “Die Ploeg.”

The acquisition of Wiegers’ work twenty years later would, with the return of the doctor to South Africa after the Second World War, be inspirational to a new generation of artists working in the Orange Free State who challenged existing norms in South Africa and introduced personal innovative ways to create art with distinct artistic styles and philosophy pushing South African towards the avant garde.

The aesthetics of South Africa in the formative years of Dr. Scott’s education was one where the most pleasing art was that which depicted the changing moods of the land; of mountains, valleys and seascapes devoid of human beings. A leading artist was Jacobus Pierneef known for his formalized and ordered view of the landscape.

The only other forms of art deemed acceptable were Edwardian portraits and sporting paintings, which were favored by the new millionaires in Johannesburg. These “Rand Lords” had made their money on the diamond fields and in the gold mines and sought to announce their social ascendancy by mimicking British taste in architecture, interior design, and art collecting.

The frictions that had led to the Boer War were still in the air in these early years of the South African Union.  British and Afrikaner clung to their own distinct social identities and art making was acceptable only if it was “safe” – that nothing in it challenged the status quo.  Some artists had gone abroad to study and absorbed Cubism, Fauvism, Expressionism and Surrealism such as Maggie Laubser and Irma Stern but their art was regarded as crude and insulting.  It is a long leap from this ordered unemotional visual canvas to Expressionism.

What would lead Jan Wiegers, who having trained in Groningen where he excelled as a sculptor, painter and printmaker, to adopt a new unique style of painting in 1920 started in Dresden in 1905.  Inspired by the brilliant colors and distorted forms of the Post-Impressionists and then the Fauves as well as by peasant art and primitive art, artists in Dresden led by Kirchner; broke from the classical and mythological painting meant to uphold the majesty of the Kaieserrreich. Influenced also by German woodcut painting they used jagged lines for their forms and adopted a colour palette of harsh brightly coloured pigmentation – meant to evoke deep inner emotion to the viewer. But expressionism and emotive feeling had always been part of the German psyche.

Its embryonic forms can be recognized in the physical and spiritual suffering depicted in Grünewald’s’Crucifixion’.

All that differed with the Expressionists was that they sought to evoke this heightened emotion through a new art language and subject matter. Dresden like other German cities had become crowded with city dwellers. It presented a 20th century reality of new modern life and pulsated with the movement of peoples, trolley cars and atomized machinery.

Artists peered into the ugly underbelly of city life where decadence emanated from nightclubs and surrounding streets inhabited by prostitutes and dancers. Breaking from the old social order allowed for a new freedom if lifestyle, one distinctly bohemian. Artists lived openly with their girlfriends and the nudes in their pictures were their lovers who they captured in casual poses and expressed with blatant sexuality.

It was this stylistic convention of emotive feeling, harsh colors, jagged lines, sharp juxtaposition of colors and fragmentation of form that Kirchner took with him to Davos in 1920 when he retreated to a sanatorium to recover from the horrors he had seen as a soldier in World War One. Plagued by bronchial inflammation Wiegers, with money raised by his artistic colleagues, arrived at the same sanatorium and the two men struck up a friendship that would last until Kirchner’s death in 1938. Wiegers was immediately attracted to Kirchner’s expressionism as is demonstrated below.

This is very close in style and subject matter to the work of Wiegers in 1921. Wiegers rented a house in Frauenkirch close to Kirchner. His landscape would be the first painting Dr. Scott would acquire in 1940 – “Haus in den Lärchen”.

The landscape painting is most likely a view from the side of the Kirchner’s house capturing the stable and to the right, part of the roof of the “Haus in den Lärchen” where Kirchner lived, with what appears to be the Seehorn Mountain in the background. With is sharp ascending and descending lines and bold juxtaposition of bright green yellows pinks and reds the painting appears dangerous and confrontational.

The second purchase made by Scott in 1940 is “Still Life with Sculptures” painted in 1921.

In retrospective analysis of the work the interpretation given is that this was most likely painted by Wiegers in Kirchner’s house, as the three wooden sculptures depicted are works carved by Kirchner depicting his girlfriend Erna Schilling^. Further evidence that the nude sculpture was with Kirchner at the time when Wiegers painted the present work is evident in the photograph of the dancer Nina Hard who was Kirchner’s guest during the summer of 1921.

In a personal communication Wiegers confirmed that this painting was painted during 1921 and that he mixed his oil paints with paraffin to execute the work. The picture again is very close to Kirchner’s own depiction of nudes and to his colour palette.

Scott recounts that he found this painting in Galis coal shed after returning one day from work. There is no doubt Galis knew the work was important and one has to look at the social and political climate of Holland at the time to understand why Galis was about to burn it.

The Nazis invaded Holland on May 10^th 1940.  The goal of the Nazis as a totalitarian regime was a populace that did not think for itself and was therefore easy to control. Any expression of a person of his existence as a particular individual with particular traits, rather than as a member of a group was seen as a threat to the power and security of the state. It is not surprising therefore that they mounted an attack on modern art, which they banned, firing its practitioners from their jobs and sometimes forbidding them to work.  Almost all members of Die Bruke  as well as other leader of the avant garde to include Otto Dix in 1933, Max Beckmann in 1937; Erich Heckle and  Emil Nolde had their works confiscated and destroyed and were forbidden to practice art. A five-man commission toured German museums, confiscating modern works; more than 16,000 were seized, some to be put in storage, some sold abroad, and many thousands burned. In 1937 about 650 such works were presented in an exhibit in Munich titled “Degenerate Art”.  Kirchner was included in the exhibition. Kirchner’s suicide in 1938 could only have been occasioned by the attack against his art and inability to carry on painting.

When the Nazis invade Holland the presence of Wiegers nude bodies in his studio endangered Galis’ own career as an artist.  News of what had happened to artists in Germany would have traveled to Holland and Galis could not chance owning a nude expressionist painting – he had to destroy it. It must have come as a relief that Scott found it and approached him to purchase it

Dr Scott returned to South Africa after the war and eventually settling in Bloemfontein he supported an encouraged artists of the Orange Free State to form The Bloemfontein Group in 1958. and their work eventually led to his forming the F.P. Scott Trust and this became the basis for the development of an Art Museum for Bloemfontein.

Marianne Podlashuc

All good art presents some point of view, a vision of the world or an alternative world. But not all art is, in the narrow sense of the word, political.  Great art is expressive of the individual artist at his best, when he is seeing deeply and uniquely into the nature of things. To a collector whose mind is attuned to such thinking, and whose eye takes him beyond the ordinary and familiar –great art encourages him to rediscover the depths of his own soul. Art makes possible, through the deep encounter with the vision of another, a genuine expansion of the viewer’s consciousness. This is what makes lovers of art respond to a painting. it is the reason they buy it, it is what turns them into a collector as each acquisition takes them further down the road, deeper into the chase. The further one goes down to road of discovery, the quicker one spots those works created not from the aim to please, but to challenge the mind, break new ground, present new ideas as to the nature of art making or the human condition. Scott’s collection as it grew did just that. His ability to discern made for art patronage of evolving art expression in South Africa. Work that is unique at the time of its creation remains unique. Its value only climbs over time. Whatever other movements may follow great painting becomes greater. The work of Wiegers stuns the viewer still today.  How often other than in museums, can the public, especially a South African public encounter it?  The exhibition of the works starting Tuesday at Stephan Weltz in Johannesburg is probably better than anything one can presently experience in any gallery or museum in the country.  I greatly thank Fred Scott who brings these paintings back from their long time seclusion to the art stage, and for igniting my interest in their story.