Provenance

Bonhams, London, 20 March 2013, lot 53.

Notes

This undated work is connected to the productive period that characterised Gerard Sekoto’s life in early 1950s Paris. Sekoto left South Africa for the French capital in 1947. He initially struggled to gain a foothold in his adopted home. His finances were precarious and Sekoto jobbed as a musician. His lodgings were inadequate. Without a studio, his painting practice also suffered. Colour, the life force of his works from the 1940s, retreated from his palette. Bouts of heavy drinking bookended by a failed suicide in 1949 saw Sekoto briefly institutionalised. The artist’s introduction to Marthe Bailon arrested his fall.

Born in 1884, Bailon was a muse to poet René Maria Rilke and associate of the sculptor Rodin. Bailon agreed to rent rooms in her Saint-Germain-des-Prés apartment previously occupied by émigré American writer James Baldwin to Sekoto. Cordiality between the new lodger and Bailon matured into a romantic relationship. The stability that followed was hugely productive for Sekoto. “He began to feel that the pieces of his life and work were falling into place,” writes Sekoto’s biographer Noel Chabani Manganyi. “He was getting over his initial estrangement, finding solutions to new problems in his painting and being productive to the extent that he could exhibit in Europe, America and South Africa.”¹

Colour returned to Sekoto’s palette – “fiery red oranges, greens and eloquent blacks,” according to Lippy Lipschitz.² Sekoto did not limit himself to portraying Parisian subjects. He depicted Ndebele and Basotho women, as well as children. This keenly observed composition of three children lost in play on a beach is typical of Sekoto’s observational style. It likely derives from his regular visits to the French Riviera with Bailon, who owned a home in the port city of Toulon. Bailon’s poor health limited the couple’s use of the city’s beaches. The couple spent most of their time indoors, but Manganyi nonetheless adds: “Sekoto liked these visits to the south because, by his own admission, he would get a lot of work done there.”³

The beach was a great site of painterly rapture and experimentation for generations of modernist French painters. With its remarkable fauvist palette, this gorgeous study of innocent pleasure and aristocratic leisure marks Sekoto’s confident entry into the lineage of Cézanne and Seurat. Refreshed after his struggles, Sekoto is here finding new ways of depicting the world outside the studio. His confidence is palpable.

^1. Noel Chabani Manganyi (2004) Gerard Sekoto: I Am an African, Johannesburg, Wits University Press, page 99.

^2. Ibid, 95.