oil on canvas

Literature: Skawran, K. ed. (2005). Walter Battiss: Gentle Anarchist. Johannesburg: Standard Bank, colour illustration on p.56.

(1)

45 x 60 cm

Notes:

This work is exceptionally interesting and significant in Walter Battiss’s oeuvre. As an example of his later ‘erotic’ work and displaying his ambivalence to rigid categorisations of sexual identity it also shows his debt to the history of art. With its pop aesthetic, swathes of colour reminiscent of Matisse and a direct reference to Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538), here we see Battiss the trickster at the height of his powers. Matthews is a very serious art-historical ‘joke’: he has substituted Titian’s goddess of love with a man, who triumphantly exposes, rather than coyly hides, his genitals. In this version a sleeping dog (a renaissance symbol of fidelity) is replaced with a cat and the gender of the attendants in the background are also swapped. In Matthews, an image of Titian’s work hangs above the body of the reclining figure, to make the joke plain.

Nicolaas Coetzee has described how Battiss’s sexual imagery carried a radicalism in it in the South Africa of his day (Coetzee, 1985) and this work is no exception. That the subject portrayed was a black man is similarly highly significant in this context. In 1981 Richard Cutler visited the artist and published a photograph of Battiss painting onto the skin of a ‘Venda student’ in Style magazine (Cutler, 1981). This was Matthews, a friend of Battiss’s cook who stayed with the artist for six weeks. In a recently published letter Battiss describes him thus:

He was excellent with a feline mask & cheetah’s claws & flowers round his belly. He danced in the nude like they would for the gymnopedies of Satie. He was very willing [to be] initiated into the sexual practices of Polynesia and a fluorescent light would shine on his teeth when in ecstasy (Battiss & Siebrits, 2016).

André Croucamp has noted how, despite his tendency to shock, Battiss was most interested in portraying the freedom to love and be loved (Croucamp, 2005). His defiance of sexual ‘norms’ and racial laws was paramount to his practice as well as the mirror of it, his life.

Andrew Lamprecht

Sources:

Battiss, W., & Siebrits, W. (2016). Walter Battiss: ‘I invented myself’: the Jack M. Ginsberg collection. Johannesburg: Ampersand Foundation, p. 216-217.

Coetzee, N. (1985) Eroticism and Battiss. In: K. Skawran & M. Macnamara, eds., Walter Battiss. Craighall: Ad. Donker, pp. 75-92.

Croucamp, A. (2005) The sexual banter of the jester-king of Fook. In: Walter Battiss: gentle anarchist. Johannesburg: Standard Bank, pp. 55-57 (illustrated on p. 56).

Cutler, R. (1981) This is a Walter Battiss original – Walter Battiss. Style magazine, May, p. 57.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to Giles Battiss for information included in this essay.