Notes

In retrospect, this seemingly unassuming still life painted by Alexis Preller in 1940, the year he signed up to join the South African Medical Corps, has a wistful but significant allusion to his earlier studies at the Westminster School of Art in London under Mark Gertler. Gertler was at the time a prominent London painter closely associated with the Bloomsbury Group which included figures such as the writer Virginia Wolf, and the painters Vanessa and Clive Bell, Duncan Grant and others.

The famous country home, Charleston, which this group frequented and decorated in a distinctive manner influenced by the Fauves had mantelpieces, walls and furniture painted with flat decorations of flowers, plants and figures. The distinctive palette of soft yellows, salmons, violet, greens, oranges and turquoise became a signature feature of this moment in English art history. The simplified and stylised decorative domesticity of these interiors and the works produced by the associated painters were to influence a movement of which this early Preller work is an echo.

In the previous year of 1939 Preller had undertaken an ambitious painting expedition, driving all the way from South Africa up into the Belgium Congo, staying en route at Lake Kivu and Lake Tanganyika. Here he acquired three Barotse terracotta vessels; a pair of characteristically sleek shaped Lodzi birds and an unusual small figure with a large vessel-shaped head. These three modest objects added to his collection were to become part of his 'household gods' and were to influence his work in time, appearing in many guises in his work throughout his lifetime.

This Still life with Barotse vessel, red cloth and Petunias '40 painted just prior to Preller's departure for North Africa at the outset of World War II, includes one of these birds for the first time. Here the depiction of a series of ostensibly disconnected objects has an eerie uncertainty about it. Preller includes in this work a book in the far left corner with the Barotse bird seemingly gazing at it, a strident draped salmon-red cloth centrally placed unusually dominates the still life. To the left a small green sculpture of a female water bearer josstles for attention. A Nile green vase, placed on the tail-end of the salmon drape, is filled with half open petunias in violet, pinks, and purples. The distinctive decorative flatness of the work with its simplified and stylised rendition of objects is played off against the soft yellows and greens that permeate the whole composition, all harking back to the English influences of the Bloomsbury.

In 1945 on Preller's return from the war he takes refuge in his small house, Ygdrasil, on the outskirts of Pretoria and conitnues to paint a number of strangely beautiful but disarming still lives of the same Barotse birds entitled Strange Altar, 1945, and Strange Altar in the Studio, 1946, but these paintings are populated with hauntingly mysterious figures and are in stark contrast to gentleness of his earlier still life.

Provenance

Purchased from Mastromatteo, Pretoria, and thence by descent.