Notes

The artist arrived in Paris in 1947 and returned to South Africa in 1951.

Frustrated by the conservative doctrine of Edward Roworth at the Michaelis School of Art in Cape Town, and bold enough to abandon his local studies, Labuschagne moved to Paris in 1947 and focused on developing a Cubist aesthetic. The artist and his wife rented a small room on the Île de Saint Louis, where they welcomed Gerard Sekoto on his arrival in Paris. The two like-minded artists had met previously in Cape Town, and after the Labuschagnes moved on to an apartment on the Rue des Ursulines, a stone’s throw from the Luxembourg Gardens, Sekoto took over their lease. Labuschagne’s early experiments in Paris were well-received, and he exhibited at the Salon de Mai in 1950 and the following year at the Genoa Biennale alongside the likes of Picasso, Leger and Rouault. He settled back in South Africa in 1951, continuing his remarkable abstract trials on his farm in the Piet Retief area. Sekoto, of course, in self-imposed exile in the city, would never return to his homeland.