Notes

In Memoriam
Cecily Sash, the last living founding member of the famed Amadlozi Group – and its only woman artist – died this September at 94 years old, in Wales. Alongside Cecil Skotnes, Edoardo Villa, Sydney Kumalo and Giuseppe Cattaneo – all under the sway of Egon Guenther – Sash helped establish a strong African identity in the visual culture of mid-century Johannesburg. She was a dynamic, inventive, disciplined and forward-thinking luminary in the South African art world, both in her role as artist and as teacher. Sash trained under Maurice van Essche at Wits Tech Art School, and then later, in London from the late 1940s, with Henry Moore at Chelsea Polytechnic and Victor Pasmore at Camberwell School of Art. After six years’ teaching at Jeppe School for Girls in Johannesburg, she became a fulltime lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand before settling in Wales in the early 1970s. Her style shifted and developed during her continuous and influential years as a teacher and, while she exhibited regularly both here and abroad, took on a number of prestigious, era-defining commissions, including major mosaic murals for the Transvaal Provincial Administration Building (1963) and Jan Smuts Airport (1968). She showed work at the São Paulo Biennale (1963 and 1967), as well as the Venice Biennale (1964), and moved comfortably between linear objectivity, material experimentation, and bold, decorative abstraction: her work could be defined by its sure draughtsmanship, its earthly and tactile surfaces, or its sleek Op Art rhythms. Thankfully, strong holdings of her work are kept in major state and municipal collections, particularly in South Africa and Britain.

Literature

Esmé Berman (1983) Art and Artists of South Africa, Cape Town: AA Balkema. Premonition II. Illustrated in black and white on page 396.