Notes

Contrapuntal Figures II, a large and dazzling canvas, was painted in 1964; its distant companion piece, Contrapuntal Figures, had appeared under the ‘African Figures’ subtitle at the Henry Lidchi Gallery in March 1956, alongside such iconic paintings as Hieratic Women, Woman with Lyre (the first version), Primavera and Consider the Lizard (included in this catalogue as Lot 263). Despite this time gap, both versions are characterised by a strong emphasis on a painterly quality. The fluidity of paint is especially noticeable in the present lot, and is used as a device to create a sense of shifting surface layers. This is of course in contrast to the meticulous, linear nature of the artist’s more familiar mid-century style.

Excitingly, Preller shows his bravura handling of paint in Contrapuntal Figures II, allowing it to run down the canvas in areas, much as he had allowed it to do in The Golden Fleece, his blazing, unforgettable work from 1962, celebrated as the first entirely abstract composition the artist had exhibited. Moreover, he shows his sophisticated colour range: delicate lilacs, warm yellows and recessive, cobalt blues overlap, while interjections of black and red play strong compositional roles.

While the influence of Georges Braque is evident in the use of colour and painterly application, and a nod to Henry Moore appreciable in the two curvilinear and dense forms, a number of Preller’s own symbols and quotations appear in Contrapuntal Figures II. Perhaps most obvious is the couple of seated or semi-reclining bodies – their heads cleaved and flattened and their limbs stylised in the extreme – which are so closely related to the artist’s numerous hieratic women. Sharp, curving spikes, teeth and thorn motifs recur, moreover, while egg forms, having first appeared in Preller’s paintings in the late 1940s, seem to emerge through the soft lilac veil of the background, much in the same way one did in another work from the same year, In the Beginning.

The expansiveness of Contrapuntal Figures II’s approach suggests the artist re-engaging with a painterly world after spending the years between 1959 and 1962 on the enormous, intricate, all-consuming Discovery mural for the Transvaal Administrative Building in Pretoria.

Karel Nel and Alastair Meredith

Provenance

Estate Late Alexis Preller, Volks Art Auctions, 3 March 1978, Lot 33, (titled Two Seated Figures).