Notes

Alexis Preller’s Adam and Eve is one of the artist’s mid-career masterpieces. Monumental and lyrical, rich and gorgeously coloured, timeless yet jaw-droppingly unique, symbolically loaded and joyously intricate, the painting is a beautiful snapshot from Preller’s very personal vision of Africa. Executed in 1955, shortly after completing his first major mural scheme, All Africa, for the former offices of the Receiver of Revenue in Johannesburg, the painting was first exhibited at the Lidchi Gallery in March 1956 with other seminal works such as Hieratic Women (1955), Primavera (1955) and Woman with a Lyre (1956). While Preller’s imagination had always relied on African source material – think of The Long Shelf (1952) with its small Benin bronzes, ebony Masai head, and Barotse ceramic birds and figural vessel – the appearance and very direct representation in this work of a carved Dogon sculpture comes as some surprise. The seated couple, however, are never presented as an exotic accessory or curio that might crop up in a still life composition, but are rather reimagined as part of an Africanised creation myth. Inspiration had certainly come in the form of photographs published in the Bollingen Foundation’s book African Folktales and Sculpture (1952), which had formed part of the artist’s research for All Africa. Front, profile and rear views of the carving had caught his eye, but he settled on the latter only for Adam and Eve. If the inclusion of the Dogon sculpture is unexpected, other elements of the painting are more familiar, pulled from the artist’s ingenious visual vocabulary. The masklike emblematic sun above, and the colourful concentric discs below, recall All Africa’s central panel, while the conical form on the right of the composition, like an East African conus shell or a ruined tower at Great Zimbabwe, can be traced back through pictures like Three Figures (1953), The Last of the Mapoggas (1954) and Hieratic Women (1955). Preller’s Garden of Eden is stripped back to bare symbol: leaves and petals hang in the air; the landscape is reduced to a low, decorated mound; and the Tree of Life is suspended in a blue-white sky, revealing the serpent, in the form of a stylised and camouflaged lizard, clinging to the smooth bark.

‘The work has been meticulously crafted. The colouring is subtle, the forms are crystal clear, the space luminous and bounded only by the decorative margins of the format. In all, a wondrously paradoxical blend of African and Quattrocento and subjective inspiration.’
Karel Nel

Exhibited

Lidchi Gallery, Johannesburg, Alexis Preller, 13 to 24 March 1956.

Pretoria Art Museum, Alexis Preller, Pretoria, 24 October to 26 November 1972.

Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg, Alexis Preller: Africa, the Sun and Shadows, 13 October to 5 December 2009.

Literature

Esmé Berman and Karel Nel (2009) Africa, the Sun and Shadows and Collected Images, Johannesburg: Shelf, illustrated in volume II on pages 130 and 131.