Important South African and International Art, Decorative Arts & Jewellery

Live Auction, 15 October 2018

Art: Evening Session

Sold for

ZAR 398 300
Lot 589
  • Erik Laubscher; Storm Oor die Land van Waveren


Lot Estimate
ZAR 250 000 - 350 000
Selling Price
Incl. Buyer's Premium & VAT
ZAR 398 300

About this Item

South African 1927-2013
Storm Oor die Land van Waveren
signed and dated 93/95; signed, dated 1993 and inscribed with the title on the reverse
oil on canvas
64 by 99cm excluding frame

Notes

In 1970, writing in the catalogue for his survey exhibition at the University of Stellenbosch, Erik Laubscher organised his paintings into five developmental phases. Tellingly, three of them dealt with his treatment of landscape. Laubscher was especially intrigued by the pastoral landscapes of the Swartland, enough to list these paintings as a distinct category in his earlier development. Painted when the artist was in his mid-60s, the present lot depicts the tilled landscapes of the so-called “Land of Waveren” in the Tulbagh region of the Bree River Valley, adjacent to the Swartland. The Waveren name is derived from a prominent Amsterdam family related to Governor Willem van der Stel’s mother and often features in early historical accounts of the Cape. Unlike his earlier geometric landscapes from the 1960s, the artist’s later work reflected a more naturalistic approach. Flatness, a key value of Clement Greenberg’s theory of abstraction and a defining feature of Laubscher’s early landscapes, is set aside in favour of perspective. The pregnant clouds, tilled landscapes and vanishing road cumulatively direct the eye to a point far on the horizon that is also at the centre of the painting. Laubscher did not wholly forsake his French modernist education in his later career. His fragmented landscape and the overall “monumental approach”1 adopted in this composition integrate lessons that Laubscher picked up from his Paris master, Cubist painter Fernand Léger. - Sean O’Toole

 

  1. Muller Ballot. (1994) Erik Laubscher, University of Stellenbosch, Stellenbosch, page 7.

View all Erik Laubscher lots for sale in this auction