Notes

Constituting a mature landscape, Free State Mountains contains all the elements that make Gregoire Boonzaier one of South Africa's best loved landscape painters. When he painted this scene in 1953, the influence of Pieter Wenning early in his career was completely integrated, and to a large extent eclipsed, by a more assertive style and composition of the South African landscape. Studies in the United Kingdom in the early 1930s contributed significantly to Boonzaier's development as an artist. In 1938, he was arguably the most dynamic founder-member of the New Group. Artists included Terence McCaw, Florence Zerffi and Freida Lock, all intent on breaking with the staid tradition in South Africa of representational European landscape painting and replacing it with a more abstract approach. Boonzaier subsequently travelled throughout South Africa, introducing the platteland to a form of Modernism that was certainly unknown to most of its inhabitants and consequently creating a receptive market for his own work and that of many other South African artists. His credo was simple: "Abstract art is a capitulation to the camera, yet mere verisimilitude has never been an aim of art - the artist’s personality has always imbued the object with his own artistic vision. Present preoccupation with colour, form and texture display undue concern with facets of the craft."¹

^1. Esmé Berman (1983) Art & Artists of South Africa: An illustrated bibliographical dictionary and historical survey of painters, sculptors & graphic artists since 1875, Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, page 68.

Provenance

Strauss & Co, Cape Town, 10 October 2016, lot 549.

Strauss & Co, Johannesburg, 20 May 2019, lot 241.