Notes

Gerard Sekoto is a very important figure in the art history of African modernism. He sensitively portrays the dignity of life in black communities in paintings rich with color and infused with a light that seems to glow from within. His works suggest a sense of calm, despite the challenges that this artist must have endured under apartheid. His international reputation was hard-fought and justly earned.ⁱ

So says Christine Mullen Kreamer, PhD, Deputy Director & Chief Curator, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, in affirmation of the artist’s international status as a major African artist.

Sekoto was born in 1913 at the Lutheran Mission Station at Botshabelo, near Middelburg in Mpumalanga and died in Paris in 1993. Though less than a quarter of his artistic life was spent in South Africa, it was undoubtedly “the richest creative period of his career, during which he sensitively captured the soul of such areas as Sophiatown, District Six and Eastwood” according to Lesley Spiro, one of the most authoritative writers on Sekoto to date.ⁱⁱ

The three remarkable paintings by Sekoto on this auction were produced in Eastwood, near Pretoria, where he lived with his family from 1945 until his departure for Paris in 1947. According to Spiro, former Paintings Curator at Johannesburg Art Gallery and curator of Sekoto’s first major museum retrospective:

The Eastwood period may represent the pinnacle of Sekoto’s achievement. It was a time when he pushed his understanding of colour and form to new heights, when he seemed to sharpen even further his already remarkable sense of mood and movement.ⁱⁱⁱ

With his lively curiosity, his interest in people and his keen observation, Sekoto was the ideal storyteller. Here the stage is set for a narrative to unfold. A statuesque woman sashays down the street perfectly balancing a bundle on her head and her baby on her back, the old man snoozes on the stoep, a dapper gentleman in a hat approaches at left and two women gossip at right, while a youth loiters by the shop window.

Spiro has remarked that, while Sekoto evoked more and more powerfully the soul of Africa, his work echoed increasingly the artistic sensibilities of Europe. The dramatic composition is bisected by a diagonal line that draws one’s eye to centre-stage. Bright sunlight casts the scene in blocks of light and shade that emphasise the picture plane and figures are simplified and tonally modelled for sculptural effect – formal devices characteristic of a Modernist vision.

Clearly naturalistic detail was of less interest to the artist than evoking an atmosphere and communicating psychological content. The foreground figure of the dozing man suggests an atmosphere of afternoon languor permeating this place in which the artist clearly felt at home and at ease.

ⁱ Email to Emma Bedford, 13 September 2011.

ⁱⁱ Lesley Spiro, Gerard Sekoto: Unsevered Ties, Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg, 1989, page 9.

ⁱⁱⁱ Ibid, page 42.

Literature

Barbara Lindop, Gerard Sekoto, Johannesburg, 1988, page 165, illustrated in colour.

Barbara Lindop, Sekoto: The Art of Gerard Sekoto, Pavilion Books, 1995, page 53, illustrated