Notes

The town of Louis Trichardt was established in the Northern Transvaal (now Limpopo) in 1899 and named after the Voortrekker leader whose party reached the area in 1836. Attempts to change the name of the town to Makhado, after the Venda king Makhado wa Ramabulana (known as the Lion of the North, c.1840–1864), whose fortress was located in the Soutpansberg mountains 2 km north of the town, have been mired in bitter political controversy and ongoing legal wrangling.

After a visit to the Pierneef Museum (then in Graaff-Reinet) in 2007, the artist developed a fascination with Pierneef's Johannesburg Railway Station panels painted between 1929 and 1932. This "translated into an obsession with finding the original sites of Pierneef's paintings. Subsequent journeys took me to beautiful places, but also opened up questions around Pierneef's historical context as well as the environmental state of those sites today. Pierneef's Arcadian visions have been intruded on by the rude march of progress. The land that he portrayed as empty of human presence is contested and under threat. The splendour of Nature, once seen as evidence of God's handiwork, now invokes the baser attentions of Tuscan housing developers or bungee jumping entrepreneurs".¹

In the present lot, the artist represents the figures of Makhado and Trichardt superimposed on a reference to Pierneef's Louis Trichardt  station panel in the background.

1. Carl Becker (2009) Four Pierneef Sites, exhibition catalogue, Everard Read, page 1.

Exhibited

Everard Read, Johannesburg, Carl Becker: Four Pierneef Sites, 1 to 18 October 2009.

Literature

Carl Becker (2009) Four Pierneef Sites, exhibition catalogue, Everard Read, illustrated in colour on page 3.