Provenance

Cape Town Art Gallery, Cape Town, circa 1980s.

Private Collection.

Notes

The present lot is a magnificent and moving tribute by Cecil Skotnes to those who lost their lives in the series of bloody conflicts fought on the battlefields of north-central KwaZulu-Natal, sites of the Anglo-Zulu War, January to July 1879, and the Anglo-Boer war, 1899 to 1902.¹ Following a visit to the battlefields, Skotnes made this incised hand-coloured wooden panel that draws us into a deep ancestral past, a realm between birth and death. It is a metaphysical scene where landscape and figures are conflated and where once vital beings return to the womb, earth and sea. Skotnes poignantly honours the souls lost in war with a swirling fluidity of shapes and forms rendered in striking shades of rich ochres, reds, blues, browns and whites.

Skotnes is renowned for his ground-breaking incised wooden panels and woodcut prints, often with images of neglected South African histories. He was inspired by the story of Zulu king, Shaka Zulu, in EA Ritter’s 1955 biography Shaka Zulu: The Rise of the Zulu Empire. ² Skotnes initially produced a masterful portfolio of 43 colour woodcuts titled The Assassination of Shaka, each paired with a passage from Stephen Gray’s poem about Shaka’s life (1797-1828). Skotnes related how he and Gray undertook considerable research, travelling the route from Shaka’s birthplace to his Great Kraal, working on the project for almost 15 months.

Early in Skotnes's career, he encountered the art dealer Egon Guenther, a goldsmith and former gallery director in Germany, who had immigrated to South Africa. This 1954 meeting proved a turning point in the artist’s career. Guenther exposed the artist to German Expressionism and his African art collection. He encouraged Skotnes to engrave on hardwood blocks, initially making abstract, bold, black-and-white prints. A further evolution encouraged by Guenther was to turn the incised wooden blocks into stand-alone artworks. The results can be observed in this remarkable work.

^1. https://www.britannica.com/event/Anglo-Zulu-War, accessed 13 August 2024.

^2. Frieda Harmsen (ed) (1996) Cecil Skotnes, exhibition catalogue, Cape Town: South African National Gallery, page 33.