Notes

Alexis Preller’s The Great King is the scintillating and golden apotheosis of one of the artist’s most iconic themes. Dazzling, enduring, irresistible and majestic, the work comes from the long line of god-kings associated with Preller’s visionary kingdoms and Afrocentric mythologies. It was acquired in 1963 by the architect Tobie Louw who, along with his friend and associate Norman Eaton, was one of Preller’s earliest patrons. He remained in awe of the work, describing it, devotedly, some years later, in a SABC television documentary.

As with so many of Preller’s seminal paintings, the compelling evolution of the central imagery can be traced.

An early precursor, from 1952, was the disembodied Christ Head now in the IZIKO South African National Gallery, with its architectural coronet, its mask-like features and its narrow, vacant eyes. Later iterations, from 1957, each modestly-scaled and painted on wood, included The Young King I, The Young King II and The Young King III. Each in strict profile, these boyish kings wore elaborate and damascened headdresses, decorated with symbols, dripping in jewels and embellished with menacing spikes. The visual concept would have drawn on pharaonic models, images of Renaissance rulers, as well as ritual African carvings, including, no doubt, the ebony head, Maasai in origin, in the artist’s own collection, that he counted amongst his socalled household gods. Together, anyhow, the trio suggested a long-ruling ancestry.

The Great King fully and dramatically embodied the artist’s previous versions of the motif, and brought Preller’s god-king theme to a glorious and glittering close. The final rendition is the most intense and the most timeless, and seems to evoke the same power as would an ancient relic, a gilded sarcophagus, or a devotional icon. That its many wooden panels were encrusted in gold leaf, and overlaid with glistening oil paint, only adds to its spiritual strength and ornamental allure..

‘This picture is almost fathomless! Everything that one would associate with Africa is there – the gold and riches, all the authority of a dynasty almost 3000 years old, all embodied in this head of such immense power and authority. Finally, you look at the eye – and you realise that it is an absolutely empty shell.’

TOBIE LOUW

Provenance

Acquired from the artist by his friend Tobie Louw, and thence by descent.

Exhibited

SAAA Gallery, Polly’s Arcade, Pretoria, 15 to 31 October 1963.

Lidchi Gallery, Johannesburg, 22 October to 8 November 1969.

Pretoria Art Museum, Pretoria, Alexis Preller, retrospective exhibition, 24 October to 26 November 1972.

Literature

Pretoria Art Museum (1972) Alexis Preller Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, Pretoria: PAM, illustrated in black and white on page 185, catalogue number 108   

Raymond Hancock Films (1973–1976) ‘The World of Alexis Preller’, SABC television documentary, available online at www.youtube.com, the work is visible during an interview with Tobie Louw.                               .

Deichmann (1986) Die Werk van Alexis Preller 1934-1948 en 'n Catalogue Raisonné, unpublished master's dissertation University of Pretoria, catalogue number 649.

Esmé Berman and Karel Nel (2009) Collected Images (vol. 2), Johannesburg: Shelf Publishing, illustrated in colour on page 202.