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Gerard Sekoto at the Pinnacle of his Career

15 Oct 2011

Sekoto was born in 1913 at the Lutheran Mission Station at Botshabelo, near Middelburg in what is now Mpumalanga and died in Paris in 1993. Though less than a quarter of his artistic life was spent in South Africa, it was undoubtedly “the richest creative period of his career, during which he sensitively captured the soul of such areas as Sophiatown, District Six and Eastwood” according to Lesley Spiro, one of the most authoritative writers on Sekoto to date.

After first arriving in Johannesburg in 1939, Sekoto was befriended by artists and enjoyed the support of several key people in the art world. Alexis Preller gave him his first tubes of oil paint. Judith Gluckman, recently returned from Paris, is likely to have had considerable influence on the way Sekoto painted as she initiated him into Western painting techniques, teaching him about the materials of oil painting and the use of brushes and palette knife.

In Cape Town, where he lived from 1942, he associated with members of the artistic community such as Gregoire Boonzaier and sculptors Lippy Lipschitz, Solly Disner and Emile Maurice. Through the influence of Walter Battiss, Sekoto’s work was included in several exhibitions in the mid-40s organised by the Gainsborough Galleries that included New Group members and Maud Sumner, amongst others. Reviewing a New Group exhibition at the Argus Gallery in 1944, the critic for the Rand Daily Mail noted that Sekoto’s “canvases are good enough to attract favourable attention in their own right next to a hundred others by 20 of the Union’s best painters”.

The three remarkable paintings by Sekoto on the November auction were produced in Eastwood, near Pretoria, where he lived with his family from 1945 until his departure for Paris in 1947. According to Lesley Spiro, former Paintings Curator at Johannesburg Art Gallery and curator of Sekoto’s first major retrospective exhibition, it is here that he produced some of his most masterful works:
“The Eastwood period may represent the pinnacle of Sekoto’s achievement. It was a time when he pushed his understanding of colour and form to new heights, when he seemed to sharpen even further his already remarkable sense of mood and movement.”
She describes how his already adventurous palette expanded enormously and pinks, purples and greens became familiar colours in his paintings.

With his lively curiosity, his interest in people and his keen observation, Sekoto was the ideal storyteller. In Outside the Shop (R3 000 000-R4 000 000) the stage is set for a narrative to unfold. A statuesque woman sashays down the street perfectly balancing a bundle on her head and her baby on her back, the old man snoozes on the stoep, a dapper gentleman in a hat approaches at left and two women gossip at right, while a youth loiters by the shop window.

Spiro has remarked that, while Sekoto evoked more and more powerfully the soul of Africa, his work increasingly echoed the artistic sensibilities of Europe. The dramatic composition is bisected by a diagonal line that draws one’s eye to centre-stage. Bright sunlight casts the scene in blocks of light and shade that emphasise the picture plane and figures are simplified and tonally modelled for sculptural effect – formal devices characteristic of a Modernist vision.

Clearly, naturalistic detail was of less interest to the artist than evoking an atmosphere and communicating psychological content. The foreground figure of the dozing man suggests an atmosphere of afternoon languor permeating this place in which the artist clearly felt at home and at ease.

While Sekoto was part of an educated elite, he never forgot his rural childhood in Botshabelo nor the memories of Ndebele herdboys in Wonderhoek in the 1920s. Indeed, Yellow Rooms (R3 000 000-R4 000 000) evokes the bucolic charm of village life with its quiet, pastoral rhythms echoed in the repetition of trees and windows. The wide ope