Notes

Alexis Preller’s The Poet of 1965 is an early painting of a favoured subject, the poet or poet prince, and to which he returned in the early seventies in the years preceding his untimely death in 1975.

The current lot was the second Preller that collector Dr Matthys Strydom acquired and in this instance from Professor Ernst van Heerden. The original title was The Prophet, but Van Heerden being a poet himself commented that a poet is also a prophet and renamed it The Poet. It was exhibited at the famed Prestige Retrospective Exhibition, Pretoria Art Museum, 24 October to 26 November 1972.

This work bears a likeness to The Poet Prince (sold by Strauss & Co in October 2017, lot 589) and a companion work, O Poliziano where Alexis Preller pays homage to Angelo Ambrogini, commonly known by his nickname Poliziano, the Italian Renaissance poet and classical scholar, a close associate of Lorenzo dé Medici in 15th century Florence. Over a lifetime Preller had produced a series of symbolic portrait heads. The Poet belongs to a dynasty of works of mythical gods, kings, princes and angels. These powerful symbolic images of floating or disembodied heads all relate to this notion of a sculptural fragment. This poet’s head floats disembodied against a recessive dark field framed by a striking ruby red surround in the same red hue as that of his conical hat and collar evocative of Italian Renaissance portraits.

Recognisable in many renderings this poet has a slim elongated nose, and voluptuous lips. In this version, the poet appears benign with his seemingly vacant eyes in a faint wash of Preller’s
characteristic azure or cerulean. Preller’s focus on this mythical wise young poet reflects his lifelong interest in Italian culture and the far-reaching transformative power of the poetic and the scholarly in creative endeavours.

Please see the e-catalogue to view the additional image discussed in the text.

Provenance

Sotheby Parke Bernet South Africa, Johannesburg, 17 March 1967, lot 176

Professor Dr Ernst van Heerden, Pretoria.

Dr Matthys Johannes Strydom Family Collection.

Exhibited

Johannesburg City Hall, A Century of South African Art, July 1969, cat no. 51.

Pretoria Art Museum, Prestige Retrospective Exhibition, 24 October to 26 November 1972, cat no. 123. 

Literature

Pretoria Art Museum (1972) Alexis Preller: Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, Pretoria: Pretoria Art Museum, illustrated in black and white, illustrated in black and white with the title 'The Poet', cat. no. 123, unpaginated. 

Esmé Berman and Karel Nel (2009) Alexis Preller: Africa, the Sun and Shadows, Johannesburg: Shelf Publishing, referred in the text on page 284 as 'The Prophet' and again on page 371 as 'The Poet'. 

Matthys Strydom (2021) Nog Stories Teen My Muur, George: LW Hiemstra Trust, illustrated in colour on page 100, with the title The Prophet.