Notes

The present lot is carved from a yellowwood roof beam taken from the historic homestead Grootzeekoegat, near Molteno in the Eastern Cape, the former family farm and home of the artist Johannes Meintjes. The work referred to as Jónatan in the artist's diary was titled Sebastiaan upon completion.

The actor Bill Curry (1931–2015), 17-years old at the time and blessed ‘with a perfect body and good muscle definition’,¹ was the model who posed for the sculpture. Meintjes wrote in his diary as the work progressed:

‘26 November: My hands are filled with calluses, cuts and wounds; this is a result of daily toil at the yellowwood figure that we initially named 'Karools' in jest, but will eventually be called Jónatan. The sculpture progresses well. I have also been working at it for many evenings now and my body and middle sometimes ache. It is particularly exhausting to work with a 2,5 pound hammer above your head for extended periods. I wonder how many times I have hit my left thumb, but it is so boring to work with gloves – particularly in this heat.

28 November: I am pleased that I can exhaust myself physically and mentally on something like Jónatan – although [the exhaustion has] not [been] entirely successful. It has been stated that artists can express themselves to a large extent through their art and be partially freed from their sex drive; but I find this not to be the case. Daily slaving at my work, especially at an art work that requires physical energy and power, normally leaves me with an intense sex drive – like something that simply must be set free.’²

Saint Sebastian is one of the most frequently depicted saints in Western art history and his typical appearance in paintings since the Renaissance as a beautiful young man wearing a scanty loin cloth, his body pierced in numerous places by arrows, bears little resemblance any longer to the middle-aged centurion who defied the Roman emperor Diocletian in Christian hagiography. For practising his faith and attempting to convert others, Sebastian was sentenced to death. He was tied to a tree, facing an execution squad of archers. His characteristic depiction in art as bound with ropes, swooning, almost naked and looking longingly upwards, has paradoxically caused him to become a homoerotic gay icon, a symbol of both social repression and persecution, and religious or sexual ecstasy.

Although Meintjes intended to name this sculpture Jónatan, after the Old Testament figure who was the son of Saul and the faithful friend of David, images of Sebastian appear frequently in Meintjes’s oeuvre from 1945 onwards and, particularly, in 1947 and 1948, when the present lot was created. These include a series of drawings and paintings of front and back views of torsos and three-quarter-length figures, bedecked with St Joseph’s lilies, entwined with vines, or with flower stems emanating from wounds on chest and belly. The artist clearly identified himself with the martyred saint at times, as the slender Sebastiaan (1945, JM cat no 72), with a mop of neatly coiffed dark hair just like the artist’s, attests.

After its completion, during a studio visit from a local women's group, Meintjes was enraged when some of the visitors snickered at the sculpture's nudity and he promptly sawed the work in half, an ironic link back to the historical Saint Sebastian, who, having survived the onslaught of arrows, was later clubbed to death after continuing to berate the emperor for his sins.

1. Johannes Meintjes (1972) Die Dagboek van Johannes Meintjes Deel II, Molteno: Bamboesberg Publishers; page 33.
2. Ibid, page 64.

Provenance

Purchased by the current owner from the artist's estate in the late 1980s.

Exhibited

Stellenbosch University Museum, Prestige Memorial Exhibition, 15 July to 28 August 2010.

Association of Arts Gallery Cape Town, Johannes Meintjes: Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture, 8 to 18 March 1950, cat. no. 68 (titled Jónatan).

 

Literature

Johannes Meintjes (1948) Dagboek van Johannes Meintjes II, Molteno: Bamboesberg, the process of making the work is described on page 64.

A number of press reviews of the exhibition at the Association of Arts Gallery, Cape Town, in 1950 mention the sculpture: Deane Anderson, Cape Argus, 9 March; Ruth Prowse, Cape Times, 9 March; Bernard Lewis, Die Suiderstem, 10 March.