Notes

Erik Laubscher’s Still Life with Pear, painted in 1961, typifies the artist’s paintings of the 1960s, with their graphic simplicity and flattened perspectives. In this still life, a pear in an elongated mustard yellow and olive-green bowl seems to float alongside an eye-catching red tomato perfectly placed on a flattened mauve-grey surface that suggests a table. A chequered black and white block perhaps indicates a tiled floor below the central vertical darkened block of colour, which is flanked by two bands of aubergine, giving the work a decidedly dramatic effect.

Laubscher had studied at the Anglo French Art centre in London in 1946, where he was exposed to the work of Picasso, Braque and Matisse. His decision in 1950 to further his studies in Paris at the Académie Montmartre, where he was a pupil of Fernard Léger and Bernard Buffet, also greatly influenced his art practice. The 1960s became a period of consolidation for Laubscher with incremental innovation in the delineation of forms, flattened picture planes and bold use of colour.