Artist Database

Anna Vorster completed her Fine Arts degree at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1952, overlapping with Wits Group artists Christo Coetzee, Nel Erasmus, Larry Scully, Cecil Skotnes, Gordon Vorster and Esmé Berman. She was awarded a two-year scholarship to study in London and Paris and trained at the Slade School of Art at a time when the teaching staff included William Coldstream, Graham Sutherland, Henry Moore and Lucien Freud. In Paris, she shared a room with Nel Erasmus at the Cité Internationale des Arts and studied under André Lhote. Her loose though broadly realist style in London shifted to a more Fauvist colour palette and severe abstract aesthetic, possibly under the influence of Lhote’s late career loyalty to Cubism.