Notes

The present lot Blue Head is a requiem in blues and greys with flashes of white and mauve. Every feature of the countenance embodies the effect of torture as symbolised by the sinewy electric lines in contrast with the blotches of blues and greys. The eyes are without sight while the mouth stutters wordless sounds.

—Elza Miles, 2022

Albert Adams excelled at school in Cape Town and his artistic abilities were encouraged and supported by his teachers and family. He was denied access to Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town, which was reserved for white students only, so he trained as a teacher and attended part-time art classes at St Peter’s school in District Six with his high-school friend Peter Clarke. Adams was active in antiapartheid student politics until he went to study at the Slade School of Fine Art in London from 1953. After winning a Bavarian State scholarship, he went to Germany to study at the University of Munich and attended summer master classes with Oskar Kokoschka in Salzburg, Austria. One of his most significant works is the triptych South Africa, 1959, now in the Johannesburg Art Gallery, which is sometimes likened to Picasso’s Guernica in its depiction of the horrors of violence and oppression. Adams settled in London after the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960 and in 1979 was appointed to the staff of the City University, London, where he taught for eighteen years.

According to Elza Miles, “the then-young Albert Adams’s ruthless self-examination of ‘utter loneliness verging on depression’ as recorded in his diary when he studied in Munich during 1956 to 1959, is something to note when observing the present lot.”¹ In 1958, he painted the portrait of Portrait of an Afghan Student, now housed at the Iziko South African National Gallery, “whose desolateness finds reflection in Portrait of a Boy” possibly produced at a similar time. Miles goes on to question whether Portrait of a Boy (lot 223) is a mirror image of Adams’s boyhood.² A diary entry on 7 November 1956 notes his feelings about rejection: “I was never accepted as one of the family – least of all by my grandmother… When I was accepted – I was accepted as a stranger”.³

^1. Elza Miles, 2022.
^2. Ibid.
^3. Ibid.

Provenance

SMAC Gallery, Cape Town, 2016.

Private Collection.

Exhibited

SMAC Gallery, Cape Town, Albert Adams: The Bonds of Memory, 9 March to 21 May 2016.

Literature

Elza Miles (2019) An Invincible Spirit: Albert Adams and His Art, Cape Town: SMAC Gallery, illustrated in colour on page 113.