oil on canvas

Artwork date: 1939/40
Signature details: signed bottom right

(1)

41 x 51 cm

Notes:

Rare, early paintings such as this by celebrated South African artist, Gerard Sekoto, are seldom seen at auction. Produced before Sekoto’s departure for Paris in 1947, they are highly sought after by serious collectors, who recognize the value in these early works. Barbara Lindop, author of numerous publications and acknowledged authority on Sekoto’s oeuvre, commented on such an exceptional, undocumented work being found and brought to market. “It could well be from the first or second exhibition sale at the Gainsborough Gallery. I’d date it to circa 1939/40 – an early example of his new found oil technique.”1 By 1938 Sekoto had left rural Botshabelo and settled in thriving Sophiatown, the legendary black cultural hub of Johannesburg, made famous by the likes of Miriam Makeba, the so-called African songbird. Could this be a beer hall in Sophiatown? Men gather together at the end of the day, the slowly setting sun casting long shadows where they stand or sit together, enjoying a flask of beer. The focus here is on the enjoyment of one another’s company and the slow savouring of traditionally brewed beer as a marker of the boundary between work and relaxation, or between social gathering and home. It is this place and this time that Sekoto brings to life in his early painting, evoking the lives lived there in the late 1930s. Alive to the scene before him, Sekoto depicts his fellow human beings with sensitivity, warmth and empathy. Tonal variations of the primary colours animate the composition while the warm, glowing light emphasises the camaraderie between the men. Lindop describes the‘humanity of his pre-exile paintings: his lack of sentimentality, his commitment to truth, a poignant realism and an acute awareness of the heroism revealed in ordinary human life’.2 his is the place evoked in Miriam Makeba’s haunting song, Sophiatown is Gone, expressing the anguish of residents when the apartheid regime tore down their homes in the 1950s, breaking up families and dispersing communities. Its lyrics continue to haunt us:

Old Sophia is gone forever

Sweet Sophia is broken forever

Gone are those lovely bodies where the old folks play3

Sekoto’s painting is one of the earliest images of black people painted sympathetically by a black artist. As Lize van Robbroeck has articulated, “images of black people by black artists served to counter the stereotypical and picturesque depiction of Africans as forever caught, like flies in amber, in a pre-colonial, “tribal” moment”.4 She points out that Sekoto consciously chose to work in a naturalistic mode, in the traditional medium of oil on canvas, choosing a style and medium that would convey to white South Africans a high level of cultural attainment. Proud of his achievement, Sekoto maintained “I know that Art is an interior human language that accepts no colour bar”.5 By 1939 not only had Sekoto had his first exhibition at the Gainsborough Gallery in Johannesburg, but his talent was recognised and given wider exposure through his inclusion in the 20th Exhibition of the South African Art Academy. He would exhibit twice again with the South African Art Academy in 1941 and 42. In 1947 Sekoto caught the attention of the Queen Mother with whom he was photographed before his painting, Sixpence a Door, on the South African Touring Exhibition at the Tate Gallery, London. It was also in 1947 that Sekoto left South Africa for Paris where in that year and the following he attended drawing classes at Académie de la Grande Chaumière, funding his studies and earning a living by playing the piano in jazz bars by night. Sekoto continued to live in self-imposed exile in France for forty-six years. Though he never returned, he is remembered and revered as ‘the father’ of black modernism in South Africa. Largely overlooked by apartheid during his lifetime, Sekoto is now recognised for his extraordinary portrayals of the lives lived by black South Africans.

Emma Bedford

Sources:

1 Email from Barbara Lindop to Emma Bedford, 21 May 2020.

2 Lindop, B. (1995). Sekoto: The Art of Gerard Sekoto. London: Pavilion Books, p.10.

3 Sophiatown is Gone https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRycpD8aHN8. Find also Khawuleza with introduction by Makebahttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V74f9eIi9c0 to hear her insights into what life was like for black South Africans then.

4 Van Robbroeck, L. (2011). “That magnificent generation: Tradition and modernity in the lives, art and politics of the first modern blackpainters” in Carman. J. ed. Visual Century: South African Art in Context, Johannesburg: Wits University Press, p. 119.

5 Sekoto, G. (1957). “A South African Artist”. Présence Africaine. November, 14/15, Paris, p. 282.