Still Life

Notes

The present lot is in its original strainer and is framed with the artist’s original strip frame.

In 1952, Walter Battiss remarked:

"Cape Town is still the home of Impressionism, but the new and compelling work of Erik Laubscher and Eugene Labuschagne at a recent Art Club exhibition is a challenge to stale ideas in the Cape. Both these young men have studied in Paris and paint big canvases with satisfying assurance.”¹

Erik Laubscher (b. Tulbaugh 1927, d. Cape Town 2013) received the first of his formal training at Maurice van Essche’s Continental School of Art in Cape Town. His application to further his studies at the Michaelis School of Art was rejected and he decided instead to go to London. It was in London that the young artist realized that while he was receiving a solid formal training with Frank Slater, and shortly thereafter the Anglo-French Art Center, that it was the art emerging from Paris in which he recognised a kinship.

In 1950 he traveled to Paris and secured studio space at the Académie Montmartre whose director was Fernand Léger. While not a pupil of Léger’s, Laubscher remarked later when interviewed that he never forgot the former’s presence and guidance in those studios. Laubscher’s early period (1947-1955) show the young artist’s admiration for the work of Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Paul Cézanne, Bernard Buffer, Fernand Léger and others working with strong palettes and visual construction. Laubscher returned to Cape Town in 1951² and began exhibiting with members of the New Group. In 1956, he received a special commendation at the Venice Biennale. Laubscher also became a paint consultant and salesman for the company now known as Plason. He was the founding director at the Ruth Prowse School of Art, a position that he held until retiring in the mid-1990s.

In 2009, a Still Life painting by the artist cracked the R 1 000 000 mark at auction, the first time that a living artist in South Africa broke through this threshold. In 2018, the world record for Laubscher was established when a 1952 still life hammered down at R 2 000 000.¹

^1. Walter Battiss (1952) 'New art and old art in South Africa', The Studio, July 1952, page 70.

^2. Laubscher met his wife and fellow artist, Claude Bouscharain, in Paris while they both attended the Academie MontMarte. Bouscharain and Laubscher married in Cape Town in 1951, their home at 6 Cheviot Place is recognised as having hosted the soul of the Sestigers. The lounge at Cheviot Place has been restaged as part of the space fondly referred to as Erik & Claude, managed by the Erik Laubscher Heritage Trust.

Provenance

Gifted by the artist to his uncle, thence by descent.